THE END OF ORGANIZATION MAN & THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL AGE BY PAUL MCLEAN

1 Introduction

Concluding his essay, “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” Peter Drucker writes, the most important thing one can learn about Japan through its art is that “Japan is perceptual.” But all humans are perceptual, and all art employs perception.

Art asks, to paraphrase Drucker, “What does perception MEAN?”

During an office meeting, Joseph Maciariello invited me to read Peter’s essay on Japan and Japanese art, which appeared in an exhibit catalog in 1979. The object of the task was for me to illuminate the aesthetic content, to provide Joseph an artist’s opinion or perspective, and perhaps clarification on some of Drucker’s assertions. Maciariello humbly claimed that aesthetics lay somewhat outside his field of expertise, and that this essay had for some time proved on some points inaccessible.

Joseph is co‐author of Management and the foremost authority on Peter Drucker. It would be a privilege, I felt, to critically examine a Drucker text under the auspices of Peter’s noted writing partner and academic associate. After an initial reading of “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” I realized with some enthusiasm that the project could be a point of departure for explorations beyond the parameters established at the outset.

The assignment was proffered in the context of “The Drucker Difference,” a survey presented by some of the prestigious school’s accomplished faculty. The class framed Drucker’s ideology in a typical, and lively, Liberal Arts discussion format. The timing is pertinent. It was fall of 2008. From week to week, as the course progressed, the national and then the global economy descended into recession, at times ostensibly teetering on the verge of collapse. Our topics – governance, accountability and innovation – were immediately relevant to the events unfolding in New York and Washington, and the world’s financial centers.

Many of us, myself included, experienced personally the consequences of the downturn. An exhibit of mine at a blue chip Beverly Hills gallery in September coincided with the stark drop in the stock markets, and sales were roundly affected. My brother and his new wife were laid off by Wachovia, which was within weeks purchased by Wells Fargo, apparently with TARP bailout dollars. The fortunes of Wall Street and Main Street, in the vernacular of the political chattering class, converged with one’s own. Every Saturday morning in the “Drucker Difference,” our class would meet and parse Drucker. Regularly, the instructor or students would introduce recent news items for examination in the context of what might otherwise have been a rather droll or abstract Liberal Arts discourse. I can say without equivocation that the “Drucker Difference” was the best class I’ve yet attended.

2 My contributions were typically confrontational. The reasons are manifest. My mother was a labor historian, whose prime biographical interest was “Mother” Jones. My father’s family was on the management side of the equation. Our dinner table was often the scene of animated back‐and‐forths rooted in social justice (my mother’s argument). My father’s medical practice afforded us a comfortable home in the tough mountains of southern West Virginia, which added a layer of complexity to the discourse. Four years at Notre Dame coalesced my sensitivity to economic equality and morality, but also to the cultural pragmatism of prosperity. Art and free speech are expensive. Joseph and I share a “Domer” past.

Two decades as an arts professional in the breach of economics, politics and cultural production (as it is now commonly referred to in the academy and in some artists bios), have provided me a catalog of anecdotes. Here’s one: Art is multi‐dimensional today, and always has been.

This is where my Drucker perspective begins.

If there is a tonal quality to this treatment, it is to a degree related to my mother’s passing away in the course of its construction. The following work is dedicated to her.

Contents Introduction 1 ON SEEING 3 ON VISION AND ACTION 8 AFTERWORD 21 NOTES 27 NOTES ON REDEFINING AND REGULATING ART 31 ON DESIGN 41 ON REDESIGNING SOCIAL TOPOLOGIES 52 IN CONCLUSION 62 NOTES; ADDITIONAL COMMENTARIES; UNFINISHED, DISPLACED AND INCONCLUSIVE OR DRAFT ESSAYS 69 FINISH 136 CODA 158

3 ON SEEING

Before commencing a thorough analysis of Peter Drucker’s material, a breakdown of the mechanisms of the perceptual must be undertaken. Otherwise, Drucker’s assertions about Japanese art and culture, and his comparisons to Western art and culture cannot be meaningful.

A good or typical starter guide to viewing can be found in The Visual Arts As Human Experience. Chapter four of David Weismann’s book, “Three Kinds of Seeing,” provides a nice framework for understanding the exchange that takes place between the seen thing and the seer.

Many authors and critics have put forth such guides. To say that any of them is conclusive is untrue. It would be better to admit that seeing is a skill that can be improved. The refinement of vision as a perceptual tool can be a lifelong project. One needn’t be an artist to pursue the improvement of vision. In fact, a strong argument can be made that becoming a better seer is a manifestly positive goal for any person.

Some facts about seeing: The individual sees a thing. More than one individual can see a thing at the same time. No two individuals see the same thing identically at the same time.

An interesting side note: recently a man became cause for news, because he embedded a camera in his eye socket. By mechanical means he was attempting to work around the problem of more than one person seeing the same thing simultaneously. Vision has always and will always breed innovation.

Human beings are fundamentally communal creatures. We desire to share our experiences. In Druckerian terms, then, one desire that attaches to seeing is the desire to share one’s vision with another person. Art satisfies that desire.

Sharing vision is a fundamental driving force of art creation, and therefore a source of value. Improving the sharing mechanism (art) of the sight sense is one of the artist’s jobs.

One of the critic’s jobs is to aid in that task. To say that the artist and critic are vision specialists is only partly true. Both have multiple tasks in the collective.

For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the tasks of the American artist, since I am one and can comment directly. Any commentary I might offer on other kinds of artists is based on imagination or suppositions, which will be inconclusive. I attempt to notate instances in the following text, where I am being inconclusive.

4 Some critical philosophers have suggested that any conclusive register of artist qualities, for the purposes of valuation in a hierarchy, is impossible. To identify as an American artist, and hierarchically attach valuation to that definition, for instance, is inconclusive, because of conflicts engendered by sex, social standing, race, place, time and so on. In this case, inconclusive means questionable. Art, however, is not an idea. Neither is art only a contingent artifact of some arbitrary discourse. The issue of Epistemological conclusion will therefore be discussed.

As a vehicle of shared seeing, art is potentially a threat to mind‐specific operations, especially narrative control. Art involves the human hand, so obviously art cannot be uni‐dimensional, or simply an Epistemological function. Where multi‐tasking or multimedia performance is valued – basically any culture in which survival is valued, which one would think would be any culture – the Epistemologist might be viewed hierarchically as a less capable person, than say a hunter.

If I were an Episteme, I probably would figure that out before the doddering technicians did ‐ with their technical, hand‐centric multiplicitous capabilities ‐ mainly in the interests of self‐preservation. Then, I would want to develop a narrative with which to project my value to the collective. “Epistemology is much more valuable than hands‐on technical labor and multi‐tasking!” I would claim. I would do so loudly and repetitively. My life, my reproductive viability depends on it, remember. So what, if my success is not the best thing for the collective survival! Me, first!

If my collective bought it, because I refined and improved my narrative delivery until it was so good that there was no way anyone could believe anything but what I needed them to – which is that I am THE most valuable member of the collective, because of my smarts. In fact, I would argue to the collective, if you wish to survive the coming crisis (whatever crisis I could manufacture with my imagination to get the collective scared, or at least worried), you better put me in charge of this operation. My brilliant mind will organize it to be more effective, and better equipped to face this or any other challenge to come down the pike.

If any technician notices that this is all mental manufacturing, I have a special tactic for him. I will introduce the moral, or ethical question! I will call him a name, first, because I am good at inventing names. Then I will explain to the collective that anyone who is so‐named is bad, and I will go on to explain and great length and in great detail why. I will explain how the bad person endangers the collective. At that point, if they buy it, I will demand that the collective choose either him or me to follow.

Since technicians usually don’t want anyone following them around, the competition should be a wash. The good technician is congenitally annoyed, because other people are always following him around to figure out how he does what he does. When it gets bad enough, and people are starting to take up too much of his work time, he has to set up a process for teaching people what he does. He’ll pick one

5 person, the one with the best hands + mind potential, and teach him how to do what the technician does. He calls him an apprentice. After a while, the apprentice gets good enough to do what the technician does, maybe even better, because young people improve things, they see different ways of doing things. Sometimes their innovations work out.

This is great for the technician, because now he can get back to work, making the things he loves to make, which happen to help the collective. Now everybody’s following the apprentice around, bothering him! This makes the technician very happy. For fun, he sets up games to see who can make the best thing. These are competitions, but the object is serious. Sometimes the winner makes something that the collective can really use. Most of the time it’s just a way to get better at what you do, but making it seem like play.

Of course, the Episteme is jealous of the technician’s popularity. The Episteme’s happy when the crotchety technician is the first to question the Episteme’s program. He attacks the technician verbally (from a distance, because the technician is strong from all that work and has lots of strong friends). The Episteme demands that a safe place to discuss matters important to the collective be established, where no fisticuffs are allowed, where only sophisticated and civilized (Epistemological) discussions will be permitted.

The Episteme invents a narrative, how God demanded that Epistemological discussions be made, to focus the people on the right way to live. The Episteme picks somebody weaker than the Episteme, a girl who has too many boyfriends, because she has no family to protect her, and calls her sleeping around for protection and comfort a dirty name. He tells the collective, you had better punish her or God will punish you!

The collective gets so excited doing what God wants they forget to maintain their chores. When times get rough, they blame the girl (with a clever nudge from the Episteme). Soon, if they survive, the collective, especially the ones who didn’t like doing chores that much, is spending much of its time carrying out the mandates of the Episteme. The Episteme picks a few brawny (and mean) types out of the collective to protect him from the technician and his helpers.

Once he has enough people behind him, the Episteme tells the people about an important program that will ensure the collective survival. It will require everyone to get behind the Episteme. He will be their leader. Most importantly, he will need the maker of things to start making things the people need.

The technician thought he already was doing that, since most of what he made was what people asked him to make. It was fun to make the things he liked to make for himself. A lot of times the people didn’t even understand what he was showing them, when he showed them his latest inventions, because he’d gotten so good and specific about his preferences. He didn’t care sometimes if the made things did

6 anything. He might just be picking one aspect of the craft, and optimizing it, until it was no longer functional. Inevitably, though, when he went back into the shop, he had learned something in the process that he could apply on a more useful object. No one could argue that the technicians shop made the best tools and weapons.

The Episteme gathers up his gang and heads over to the shop. The collective gathers. The technician’s helpers surround him to protect him. Epistemological War is invented. If the Episteme can manage it, this is a neverending war. It preserves the illusion that installs and maintains Epistemological power.

Once the social topography of the collective is secured for the Epistemigarchy, it is only a matter of time until an Episteme ruler projects the process outward. The Episteme can always imagine more. Epistemology is viral. When the Episteme succeeds in conquering the technical and subverting its processes to Epistemological will, the collective capacity for adaptation will diminish.

The slow and fun will be replaced by command and control. The Episteme prides himself on speed of execution. The faster things happen, the less time for the collective to consider whether an action is necessary or healthy. The Episteme is mainly concerned about getting what he imagines he wants, as soon as he wants it.

Every so often, the people catch on and rebel. Someone notices an incongruity in the narrative and shares his discovery with other people. The Episteme learns to deal with such episodes brutally, quickly and efficiently. Eventually, he must develop controls on communication to suppress opposition, which may only be questioning at first. Questioning must be quelled. An overarching narrative must be generated to explain everything Epistemological plausibly. Safety valves in the system have to be installed in order to deal with dissent when it arises, and cause people to question their own perceptions, before they question the system. The system produces specialists, who can be trained to look for types of opposition or resistance or questioning. They must be provisioned with the authority to act fast and efficiently to prevent collective behavior that might displace the system. The Episteme learns it is better to err on the side of caution in these matters.

No sentient being loves enslavement, not even one who knows no choice. When the system has become nearly completely pervasive (no collective system is completely pervasive), the slave must be induced to self‐destruction before pointing his anti‐ Epistemological animus towards his masters and their system.

The Episteme now must provide a History and traditions, which will aid in suppressing resistance. These are the foremost means by which the collective is turned against the individual who sees things for what they are: problems for which the system has no or will create no solution. The Episteme devotes great energy to managing perception. This is Epistemological identity.

7 Now, the Episteme considers himself a great knower of human nature. He has created great structures to protect and sustain his power. Some of the structures are Epistemological – abstract, ideas‐based, or linguistic. Some are created through compelled or Epistemological applied technology. They may be castles, which are bigger than any individual could make. These structures must be obvious. No person should be allowed to ignore their combinative, integrative and proscriptive power.

The Episteme looks upon all he has wrought and considers it. Only a god could be this powerful. The Episteme must be a God. If he chooses to be a benevolent dictator, he will grant the collective certain freedoms, which he can undo at any moment for any reason. The more powerful the Episteme, the more such freedoms he will feel he can grant. He points to these, if anyone dare question the rightness of his authority. The Episteme always assures the collective he is thinking in their best interests.

There are a number of ways to displace an Episteme king. The most direct and effective is force of arms. Sometimes other ways work, but not often.

Plato’s Republic (trans. Jowett):

But will the imitator have either? Will he know from use whether or no his drawing is correct or beautiful? Or will he have right opinion from being compelled to associate with another who knows and gives him instructions about what he should draw?

Neither. Then he will no more have true opinion than he will have knowledge about the goodness or badness of his imitations?

I suppose not. The imitative artist will be in a brilliant state of intelligence about his own creations?

Nay, very much the reverse. And still he will go on imitating without knowing what makes a thing good or bad, and may be expected therefore to imitate only that which appears to be good to the ignorant multitude?

Just so. Thus far then we are pretty well agreed that the imitator has no knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates. Imitation is only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic poets, whether they write in iambic or in Heroic verse, are imitators in the highest degree?

Very true.

8 In the West, the Episteme Era started with Socrates, and the struggles by the Technes against the Epistemes’ dominance of the collective have continued ever since. The thinker attacks the maker. The “ignorant multitude” suffers and is kept in check and in thrall.

What do the Episteme and Technician share in the beginning? Both share vision. Both share language. Both share humanity. Both share sentience. They share everything. What do they share in the end, once the Episteme is in control? They share nothing. The Episteme owns, commands and controls the Technician and the technical. The “ignorant multitude” is deprived of direct access to the Technician (and the most effective process for meeting its needs). The Episteme takes a bite out of every transaction. The Episteme becomes the manager.

To ensure that no individual can fully document and therefore provide the collective the means to reject Epistemological control over the perceptual, the Episteme diversifies over time. The history and manifestations of Epistemological ownership of vision are so pervasive, so monopolistic, that the individual could never address all the examples in a thousand lifetimes. The Epistemological system is designed for this effect. The thoroughness of the techne‐oriented individual comes to be associated with inevitable failure, when his thoroughness is directed towards dismantling the apparatus of Epistemological perceptual control. This is the original or prime weapon in the Episteme psy‐ops arsenal. The Episteme argues, and can argue persuasively, “Why fight the system? What’s the point? It’s too big! It’s too much! You will only fail, in the end!” The Episteme will whisper, “Further, if we see that you are too stubborn, and insist on this folly, we will endeavor to shun you, or marginalize you, or stifle your voice. We have our ways, and they are diverse, cunning, baffling, and you will never win. We will turn those closest you against you. We will show you the power of guilt‐by‐association. We will deprive you of sustenance. We will portray you as a madman, a rebel whose cause is dangerous to all, a moral reprobate. We will stop at nothing to destroy you. In the end, even if you succeed, we will remake history to our liking. We will even use your resistance as a beautiful counter‐example. We will celebrate your relentless desire for truth, as an example of how our system rewards those who strive for truth, and thereby justify the system, verifying its adherence to the right principles. So what! We will make a movie about it and sell tickets! Ultimately, although you will never achieve your actual aim, we will still profit! The techne‐prophet will still yield an Episteme profit! ‘History is written by the winners,’ they say, and we will never lose. Look at all the examples of the past! So abandon this fool’s errand! Join us, and you will be amply rewarded. What is it that you desire? Money, property, prestige, a woman – what? Anything can be arranged.” And so on.

Therefore, the comprehensive critique of Epistemological critique, as typified in Peter Drucker’s essay on Japanese Art, is beyond the scope of this paper. However, we will address the most critical aspects of the Epistemological methods that inform Drucker’s work. To not do so, is to insure the failure of my essay.

9

The key to ensuring technical failure of criticism is to enforce the limitation or scope of investigation to a spectrum of interests and effects so small that no broader technical veracity can be achieved. This is the prime means by which the Epistemological system protects its domain. The modern corporate media is probably the best example of how this perceptual/conceptual weapon functions.

The best representation that I’ve seen demonstrating how this systemic strategy/tactic is employed to stifle discourse is contained in Manufacturing Consent. The documentary traces the indomitable Noam Chomsky as he attempts to counterbalance pervasive propaganda in an array of public forums, both academic and in public media.

The “sound byte” is the Episteme’s most refined innovation to date for restricting or managing free speech. In Epistemological disciplines, and practically all Humanities disciplines are Epistemological, the methodology for control is similar, but formally more expansive and intricate. The key to stifling perceptual/conceptual opposition in the Epistemological academic setting is mandated through protocols.

The given justification is the provision of a flat and universal system that ensures fair review for all. Commonality of the means of exchange is the point, ostensibly. As has been shown by an array of ambitious agents over the past half‐century of canonical reform, the system is pervasive and clever in its capacity to determine who is taken seriously and who is not.

In the Epistemological arena of ideas, brevity and concision are laudable, especially when dimensional expansion and technical thoroughness are required to approach truth, meaning free speech, or to put it another way, free vision, or freedom to perceive and conceive.

After the intitial research phase for this paper, which produced two essays for The Drucker Difference, and a number of additional essays that explored related facets, I met with Joseph Maciariello to define the scope of my thesis. I was already exhausted.

We determined I ought to focus exclusively on “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” rather than on a combined and dimensional representation of Drucker’s management ideology’s effects on the contemporary art business, and other related issues, such as Murakami as a prototype for Japanese innovation in arts management, and so on.

To adequately address the range of effects and the breadth of evidence, and to fairly represent the profound relationships between the practices and trends in the art

10 world with Drucker’s theories over a semester seemed impossible. To properly conduct an academic treatment of the huge set of data appeared to be a practically murderous undertaking for a single agent. Sleep would not be an option.

To my great relief at the time, Joseph kindly suggested he and the Drucker School would be better served, if I would simply provide a clarified review of Peter Drucker’s aesthetic topology, as expressed in the catalog essay.

As soon as I commenced to work on the project again, with my new parameters, it became clear to me that Drucker’s own style would force me to respond across a great stretch of social and metaphysical terrain. Drucker is a campaigner. To encounter him in a limited engagement, to use a martial metaphor, is to meet the entire force of his general arguments.

I saw a great opportunity to enter into a confrontation with Drucker on that broad scale, beginning with a skirmish on ground best‐suited to my expertise. Over the past several months, then, I have drawn up the lines of exchange recursively, based on the array of Epistemological lessons that Claremont Graduate University (both in the Drucker schoolrooms and the CGU MFA studios, and beyond into the domains that they service) presented me during my Masters course.

I will cite two non‐academic inspirations for this undertaking. Really, they are quotes.

One is, “Education is the rags of bondage.” A Tarahumara adobe builder, one of my first masters, spoke this to me (and a few others) twenty years ago. We were seated at a bar on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. I would suggest that he meant “Epistemological education.”

The other is, “To be fully awake and aware is to be in a constant state of rage.” My commercial filmmaker and artist friend, Harold Jarboe, often repeated this to me, when we encountered one another on our Nashville rounds.

Now, I will address the underpinnings of the following essay. The two central texts are Drucker’s Japan essay, and one other, provided me by Maciariello, without whose guidance my work would not have been possible: “How to avoid another another wasted century?” This is Peter Paschek’s brief account of his poignant discourse with Peter Drucker, spanning a few years before Drucker passed away (1995‐2003; 2007). The most interesting feature of the essay is its proposed long view of Drucker’s assumptions and conclusions or summation.

11 It is a function of dimensional analysis to correlate assumptions and effects over time. Assumptions are proved by trial and error, by application. Effects are subject to evaluation. Evaluation is a tool of accountability. Accountability must be the result of fair representation, arrived at transparently. Another word for “fair representation” is “realism.”

I do not think that a proper study of Drucker’s principles would be realistic, if one has not investigated Drucker’s formative or early writings, including The End of Economic Man and the essays on Stahl and Kierkegaard. Drucker’s admissions about and/or admiration of Tocqueville, John Marshall, Schumpeter and a few others contributed significantly to my profile of Drucker and his “social ecology.” Establishing an arc, or (r)evolution for Drucker’s vision is essential to identifying social effects for which his Epistemology is accountable.

It is impossible not to develop a personal sense of the man, which is not to say “a knowledge” of him, by tracing or mapping his creative expression. It is nearly inevitable, if the investigator is creative and the subject is creative, that the former will discover commonalities, or points of identification between the two. As recent pop culture products have showed us, detectives who hunt serial killers are sometimes in danger of knowing the mind of the madman too well. Nietzsche wrote about this once, I think.

For me, Drucker’s arc is one of the most compelling I have ever encountered. The “wasted century” essay cemented my fascination with the man’s mentation. In 1942, Drucker wrote, “The United States as a world power – perhaps as the world power – will certainly have to use her power politically; that is as power. But if the American Century means nothing except the material predominance of the United States it will be a wasted Century.”

When his friend Paschek asked Drucker, “May I conclude that finally the 20th Century wasn’t a wasted century?” Drucker replied:

NO. The only conclusion is that I wasted much of my time not writing the truly important books I should have written. My not written books greatly outnumber my written ones – and some such as “The wasted Century” or “Organizing Ignorance” might have been a great deal more important than the – easier ones – I wrote instead.” – (transposed as is)

Drucker goes on to blame “this century’s ‘charismatics” for a host of horrors. This, for me, is the thematic hinge.

Drucker’s relationship to American Democracy is throughout his lifetime problematic. Let me posit this as a procedural conjecture:

• Google Tocqueville farmer’s rebellion • Compare Marx’s discourse with Ferdinand Lassalle ["Yankees have no 'ideas'. . . . 'The freedom of the individual' is merely a 'negative idea', etc." (quoted

12 from “Democracy in America: Two Perspectives (Marx and Toqueville)” (by Nimtz, published on the website for The International Endowment for Democracy” – a nexus for Marxist Epistemology) • From the foreward for Drucker’s essay on Stahl published on the website www.peterdrucker.at (Brem, k‐lab):

o Drucker, looking back on the protagonists of his planned work, sees a connection with the political system of the United States, which he has studied intensively since the early forties: "Of course, Humboldt, Radowitz, and Stahl did not realize that what they were trying to do had actually been accomplished in the United States. They did not realize that the United States Constitution first and so far practically alone among written constitutions, contains explicit provisions how to be changed. This probably explains more than anything else why, alone of all written constitutions, the American Constitution is still in force and a living document. Even less did they realize the importance of the Supreme Court as the institution which basically represents both conservation and continuity, and innovation and change and balances the two ... And I too, it should be said, had no inkling in 1930 that what the three Germans in the early years of the nineteenth century had tried to accomplish had already been done, and far more successfully, by the Founding Fathers and by Chief Justice Marshall in the infant United States." (p. 444)

>>>

"The Conservative theory of the state must affirm the state because and insofar as it represents an obligation. It must also, however, prevent the state from becoming the only obligation, from becoming the 'total state' for the state is an order of this world, an institution arisen out of the dissolution of a supreme, timeless order, a kingdom with a human goal and meaning. And this meaning and goal, that is to say, power, is evil and demoralising, destructive, if it is not bound to a divine, immutable order, if it is not bound to God's plan for the world."

On page 8 of Paschek, we find a telling term: “schooled barbarian.” The term is presented in the context of a patently Epistemological prohibition for educational institutions, sandwiched between Drucker quotes. The context:

This means for example that we have to reform our educational institutions to be able in teaching the knowledge worker not only to make a living but also to lead a life – otherwise we will create a Society of schooled barbarian. We also have to create and develop transnational institutions who effectively cope with terrorism and environmental pollution. We further have to reinvent government, in the sense that it will focus back on its purpose.

Which points us back to that moronic and often cited Druckerism, “The purpose of government, in other words, is to govern.”

My office meetings with Maciariello, the foremost authority on Peter Drucker have produced, I can say unequivocally, the most exciting and fruitful academic dialogues I’ve yet experienced. Joe represents for me the prototype of the diligent and enlightened scholar. For a “schooled barbarian” of the genus Americanus Scoticus (myself), Maciariello does what one would expect of an accomplished and

13 intellectually fearless schoolmaster: He hears the question and either verifies or rejects, based on evidence.

No inquiry I made was ever rejected thoughtlessly. I asked Joe about Peter’s writing in English as a second language, and wondered if Joe thought this linguistic factor might have had something to do with the cryptic pronouncements Drucker was famous for. Joe, after some consideration disclosed that Peter worked very hard to communicate effectively in English.

At one point, Joe and I discussed the Austria of Peter Drucker’s youth. We discussed the history of Austro‐Prussia, and the spark that lit the fuse of the First World War. I must disclose that I have found no reason to dissociate Peter Drucker from the historical geography and ecology from which he originated. In fact, I have come to believe that Drucker’s inability to fully integrate the most elemental principles of American Democracy into his ideology is the paramount failure evidenced in his ideological arc.

I would suggest that Drucker shares this failure with other supposed great European minds of the late Epistemological Era. Since the farmer’s revolt that initially freed America from English colonial rule, American Democracy’s most dangerous and persistant opponent has been European top‐down, divinely‐ ordained rule. In his analysis of the “wasted century,” it is impossible for Drucker to point blame where it is truly due. Perhaps, Paschek ‐ who seems equally incapable of considering the truth – afforded Drucker a final chance to redeem his contribution to the global suffering Drucker attributes those “charismatics.” If so, Drucker passed, then passed on.

The scope of Drucker’s assessment should have stretched back to Socrates. It should have encompassed the pattern, the many iterations and mutations of the European Epistemology. It should have recognized the euro‐alliances forged with various transcontinental, or global, societies typified by top‐down, divinely‐ordained or – inspired rule. It should have recognized colonialism for what it has been: the viral dissemination of Europe’s Epistemological ideal for social topology. Where the Euro‐epistemology did not exist, the conquerors have sought to install it. Drucker’s assessment should have acknowledged the now‐thousands of years of escalating suffering caused by the spread of this ideological virus, which continues today under the banner of globalism.

Finally, if Peter Drucker had been capable of intellectual, or better, moral honesty, he would have seen that he had contributed mightily to the reconstituting and reformatting of this great bane on humanity. Despite his incongruent, unpracticable protestations for a better, more just and benevolent application of his version of the ancient topology, Drucker’s “management” has proven no less diabolical than its precursors. It is only divergent in its instruments, terminology, and applications. The unfortunate thing, really, is that Peter Drucker is not available for his accounting, or to witness the fruition of his lifelong toil. The books he did publish

14 are the manifesto of the neo‐Epistemology. The content of Drucker’s teachings have been employed by several generations of anti‐American, undemocratic tyrants in uniforms (blue suits, white shirts and red ties) as regular as any army in history. The management team is not gaudy or charismatic in their dress, as were the Waffen SS, but as we have seen, they are no less capable of crimes against humanity.

Drucker is known for his authoritative analysis of social ecologies, as he called them, as evidenced in business, government and service organizations. What a formidable voice, a powerful voice, was Drucker’s, as it defined the good and bad in the subjects of his dimensional analyses. To suggest why I have found him to be such an astounding literary figure ‐ if I could for a moment project Peter Drucker as a dramatic character – it is the polarity, the tension he encompasses as an outward‐ seeing self, counterbalanced by a hopelessly confounding self‐definer. Consider this passage, an autoportrait (from Paschek):

I have become increasingly skeptical of all promises to save the world through society. I think one of the main events of the last fifty years is that we increasingly became disenchanted with “Volksbegluckung” (trans., system rendering the people happy) and increasingly become convinced that there is no perfect society and that there is only a tolerable society and that there can be improvement but there can be no perfection. And this is a conservative view, but also because it puts the emphasis on the individual and the individual’s own belief, which is accentually a religious view that sees the end not in this world but beyond this world. Therefore I call myself a conservative Christian and an Anarchist in the sense that I’m increasingly suspicious of – government is the wrong word – of power. As a philospher – which I do not pretend to be – I have always seen power as the central problem and the lust for power as the basic human original sin, not sex. Sex is not a sin, we share it with all animals – but the lust for power is sin and in tht sense I’m an Anarchist although unlike the Anarchists I accept, in fact I stress the need for government. My favourite political philosopher, Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote a book aged 22 called “Limits of the effectiveness of governments”. And this has been my main interest, and my interest in the business corporations extends out the interest in the institutions which take over autonomously social tasks and thereby limit, restrain the power of the state. Therefore I still call myself a conservative Christian anarchist in that very specific sense.

In a word, this reads as prevarication. I will restrain from embarking on comparisons. I will not write that this is what a criminal sounds like while explaining how he could not have perpetrated the crime of which he is accused. I will not compare this text to a White House spokesperson during the Bush administration (II), stridently avoiding a question with a non‐definitive answer.

From the perspective of an American dimensional artist, I will suggest that Peter Drucker never painted a true portrait of himself, a realistic portrait, that we, the viewers, could juxtapose with others in the field. Peter Drucker defines himself as independent of the field, and therefore immune from comparison or similar evaluations, and therefore unregulated, or at least unaccountable. That is, unless one considers market forces to be the only meaningful metric, or the “mirror test,” or the long‐standing relationships Drucker nurtured throughout his life. Aside from

15 those metrics, which are not relevant to his Epistemology, how were Drucker’s ideas of himself, much less his ideology ever made accountable for effects?

Later in this essay, I name Peter Drucker as a villain. I present a modern historical topology that includes Hitler, Freud and Drucker as common descendents of Austro‐ Prussia. I suggest this as a dimensional conjecture. In one thing Hitler was right, even if he was creatively confusing his topological composition, as one would expect of a madman. Hitler did not possess Drucker’s commitment to clarity and linguistic precision. I am speaking of Hitler’s claim concerning the longevity of the Reich. Hitler was only partially wrong in his assessment. Hitler was, after all, a failed artist.

In the context of a dimensional conjecture, one is vulnerable to great despair. As data reveals the scale of unnecessary human suffering over the past two or three millennia, and the frightening near‐certainty of such suffering continuing along generative trajectories, it is difficult not to experience moments of the most profound soul‐wrenching. Peter Drucker was an accomplished dimensional analyst. His critique of the 20th Century proves it, even if his explanation of the causes was incorrect.

At the moment of this writing, a friend of mine, a true American schooled barbarian, is sitting alone in an altar, subjecting himself to the ancient rite of “crying for a vision.” There have always been prescriptions for the hubris, the soul‐sickness indicated by Euro‐Epistemology. This is one of them. For four days and nights, my friend will abstain from food and water. He is seeking a vision for the people. The one prays for the many, and the many for the one. In this manner, the proper relations between the individual and collective are perpetuated.

The conquering Europeans sought and failed to destroy this ceremony. My conjecture is, “Why?”

Eventually, my Tarahumara friend assured me, if mankind again becomes a nuisance, the Earth will shake him off. It is the same as when a lion shrugs its shoulders against the flies around a kill.

For Euro‐Epistemology to be defeated, a new perceptual device has evolved. Maybe it is a last‐stage offering for redemption. Like other benign devices, it does not compel. It only suggests choices, and possible futures. I am speaking of dimensionism.

16 With that, I will conclude the main production cycle of this essay, reminding the reader that this is not an Epistemological text. The episteme places great emphasis on conclusions. Conclusions are a meta‐form of “fear‐of‐death.” The dimensionist is not concerned with death. The dimensionist is concerned with life. There is an old Scottish saying: “We maun live by the living, but no by the dead.”

RIP, Peter Drucker: in the end, we are identical. Death manages all the living equally (Christ excepted, and others too, I’ve heard), and none, eventually manages death but the undertaker, the most consistent of all businesses. (April 30, 2009 – PJM)

The technical artist has objective representation as a proof or verification.

Epistemologists consistently attack representation or seek to control it. Dominance of the collective vision depends on who wins this war.

The control of vision in Western civilization is fundamental to all the power structures of the collective. What does this mean?

Freedom and Seeing

A fundamental rule of seeing is: The quality of seeing by an individual is proportionally relative to controls enforced upon the act of seeing by the collective.

The more control (collective) enforced upon the act of seeing (individual), the poorer the vision of the individual, and the greater the power of the controller over the collective, and the individual.

Individual Seeing and Societal Controls

The extent to which an individual considers the acceptability (collective) of what he sees (individual), the weaker the seer’s vision.

Seeing, Reality and the Dimensional (towards Representation)

Representation results from seeing first.

The seen object is the 1 Dimension element. It is a point in space.

17 Seeing an object is a linear (physical) function.

Line of sight is the 2 Dimension element. This element connects the person to the thing in the environment.

The environment is the 3 Dimension element. The thing seen, the seer and every other thing in the environment share 3 Dimension characteristics.

Animation is the 4 Dimension element. These are the forces that move. They include time space and relativity among animate and inanimate forms as they move.

Seeing and Interpretation

Interpretation is a secondary function of sight. Seeing is the first function. Seeing is not functionally divisible from the environment. Exceptions (such as blindness) are incidental to this fact, but do not disprove it.

Material interference, such as time lapse due to distance, is both a liability and a given fact, but does not entail that one should abandon seeing. One’s survival depends centrally on one’s ability to see. The collective’s survival depends on the individual’s quality of vision.

Conclusion 1

Therefore, the less control over seeing the collective exerts on seeing, the better the collective’s chances for survival.

Conclusion 2

Therefore, art is functional. The imperative that art not be functional is the first order of Epistemological control over seeing.

Art and Function

Art is a functional mechanism for representing reality.

18 Conclusion 3

Therefore, art and science are identical.

Mathematics

Mathematics is both Technical and Epistemological. It can be applied and it can function in its own reality. It is both logical and functional (reality).

Reality and the Dimensional

Reality is not imperfect. It is 4 Dimensional.

Conclusion 4

Math is logical in 4 Dimensions (Perelman).

Conclusion 5

Realistic art is 4th Dimensional.

Realism and Collective Survival

Realistic art improves the chances for collective survival.

Collective Control of Seeing and Survival

The relationship between collective control of seeing and collective survival is proportional. The more control the collective exerts on individual seeing, the less likely the collective survival.

Conclusion 6

19

Dimensional art is essential to our collective survival.

On Collective Seeing (Maciariello’s Proof)

The optimum dimensional construct for collective seeing is the circle of individuals facing outwards.

Abstract

CS = the circle of individuals facing and seeing outward

S = the individual facing and seeing outward

Hc = the individual hearing and calling inward

CHc = the circle of individuals hearing and calling inward

X = the center of the circle

D = the distance from the center of the circle to the edge of the outer (S) circle

D2 = the distance from the center of the circle to the edge of the inner (CHc) circle

L = the collective leader

XP = the elevated platform of the collective

L1 = the rotation of the collective leader

LVN = the leader’s visual information (data)

LAN = the leader’s auditory information (data)

N = Information (data)

VN = Visual information (data)

AN = Auditory information (data)

ON = Translation of visual data to auditory communication (data)

LON= Leader‐interpreted data

20 O = Object outside the circles

F = the collective formation

Event 1

O exists outside F

Event 2

S sees O

Event 3

S describes O to his Hc (ON)

Event 4

O as ON is conveyed to L as AN by CHc

Events 5, 6

L compares AN with VN, rotating in 360 degrees (L1)

Event 7

L communicates LON to the collective

Notes:

The individual stands at a specified distance (D) from the center of the circle (X).

Each S stands at D from X, facing away from the circle center.

Another individual stands behind each individual in the circle (facing the center of the circle) with his back to the individual who is facing outward (S>Hc)

The two communicate.

The individual facing outward describes what he sees (S

The individual facing inwards, hears the seer’s description (S>Hc), and calls the message to the center of the circle (O>S>Hc>L).

The center of the circle is an elevated platform (XP), upon which the collective leader is positioned.

21

The leader can rotate in 360 degrees on parallel to the plane (L1).

The leader’s task is to collate the data and communicate the results to the collective.

The leader must possess a strong voice.

The audio frequency of each matched pair (seeing/communicating) should be unique. The combined frequencies should be descriptive.

The collective must be able to discern the message and recognize the direction via collective frequency. The communication is waveform.

A survival‐directed collective must be capable of vision, communication and projection (of sound/voice). The leader’s communication is woven form.

Commentary

The first iteration of this construct (as a concept) was posed as a question by Joseph Maciariello. The question arose from the topic “How does vision enhancement improve the collective’s chances for survival?”

The construct moves slowly across the conceptual plane.

O is seen by more than one S Point at one time, and each S‐POV offers a distinct, but related description.

While a number of S Points are directed at O, other S points will continue to optically scope the plane.

If necessary, Hc may rotate 180 degrees to temporarily act as additional S Point. The nearest Hc may function as Hc2, and communicate the visual data provided by HcS.

The second iteration of the construct is the attached drawing (Illustrations).

References

For the past several years, I have been creating symmetrical circular digital images from all kinds of original and captured source material. See I1 below.

22

I1

Source materials have included photographs, drawings, paintings, text, and digital designs. I will not go further into a procedural description on how the final image develops. I will say that in Photoshop, the process involves “flipping” the source data horizontally and vertically. By varying the steps, manipulating or choosing color or color sets, expanding and contracting image size and so on, the artist could conceivably continue to work from a single data source ad infinitum.

I1 can be defined as a cell in a pattern, which can be repeated ad infinitum. The pattern therefore can fill any dimension within the “flat” frame or framework.

Correlates and Inspiration

There are many, and they span a broad cultural spectrum. I will list two.

Cangleska: the Lakota (Native American) “medicine wheel”; a central form within the social topology, with applications for the individual and collective. On an interesting side note, there is a book in publication for business readers, applying Cangleska Wakan (trans., “sacred hoop”) concepts to management and business practice, called Forging the Heroic Organization: A Daring Blueprint for Revitalizing American Business (Murphy with Snell). The Lakota historical experience is revelatory for the purposes of this paper overall, and inform it significantly. For one

23 thing, the Lakota‐American exchange, especially in terms of Euro‐Epistemology, has to some degree been documented and suppressed. As one of the great and ongoing instances of “collateral damage” to Manifest Destiny, specifically with respect to the issues of private ownership and legality, tantamount to a rupture of the arcing narrative of the United States, the genocide and ethnocide attempted on the Lakota people by American and private forces over the past several centuries is exemplar of the colonial effects of Euro‐Epistemology. I will not include a translation (either visual or textual) of the Cangleska Wakan, its profound meanings and value here. The Lakota have their own methods of transmission, and there is much abuse of their traditional views and practices. As a narrative hinge, I will as an ancillary (realistic) anecdote include a citation, a biography of the Lakota man after whom Sinte Gleska University in Mission, South Dakota is named, from the school’s website:

History of Sinte Gleska (Spotted Tail) 1823­1881 Sinte Gleska Portrait

Sinte Gleska (Spotted Tail) was born near the Makizita Wakpa (White River) in west central South Dakota in the winter of 1823‐1824, The Year When They Camped Near A Cornfield because of the severe winter (Big Missouri River Wintercount). His father was called Tangle Hair and his mother was known as Cannupa Yuha Mani Win (Walks With Pipe Woman). He came from the Sihasapa Lakota Division and he belonged to the southern bands of the powerful Sicangu Nation (Burnt Thigh).

As a boy, Sinte Gleska was called Tatanka Napsica (Jumping Buffalo), and when he achieved warrior status, he was named Sinte Gleska. This name had been given to him because he often wore a raccoon tail, obtained as a gift from a trapper, when dressed for war or ceremonial.

Sinte Gleska rose to prominence at about the age of thirty when he was installed as an Ogle Tanka Un (Shirt Wearer), or a war leader. His credentials for achieving this honor were impressive. His shirt was said to have been adorned with over a hundred locks of hair, each representing coups, scalps taken and horses captured. As a war leader of the Southern Sicangu, Sinte Gleska was actively involved in earlier struggles with the Wasicu (white man)

24 over their aggression and encroachments on Sicangu Territory. During his tenure as shirt wearer, Sinte Gleska, in 1855, helped bring about the end of the brief, but costly, Overland Trail War by surrendering himself along with four others to be imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This occured when the U.S. Military held seventy Sicangu's captive (mostly women and children taken at the Blue Water fight of 1855) as bargaining chips to compel the speedy surrender of the leaders and participants involved in the slaying of Grattan's command and raids on the Overland Trail. Sinte Gleska was one of the leaders.

Sinte Gleska PhotoSinte Gleska's surrender and ordeal of imprisonment led the people to view this as an unselfish sacrifice for the good of the tribe, and they continued to follow him as war leader. Furthermore, eleven years after his release from confinement at Ft. Leavenworth, the Southern Sicangu remembered and elevated Sinte Gleska, now an experienced leader, to Wicasa Itancan (civil leader), the highest leadership ranking found among the Sicangu.

The impact of Sinte Gleska's leadership during the 1860's on the southern band of the Sicangu was immediate and effective. With the full support of the tribal council, he united these fragmented bands into one cohesive unit and steered their course towards a limited degree of tolerating and accepting the presence of the Wasicu and the acculturation policies. At the close of the 1870's Sinte Gleska extended his influence over the northern Sicangu bands when their leader finally pressured by the U.S. government to reside on the Great Sioux Reservation, Sinte Gleska was the overall leader.

The closing years of Sinte Gleska's life are considered the most significant in the terms of contributions made to the Sicangu Lakota, and quite possibly Native Americans in general. It was during these years that he began to look at long‐range goals and the struggles that the Sicangu people were to endure. As one of the important Lakota leaders, Sinte Gleska viewed people from the highest position and perspective. Viewing people from his level and dealing with the U.S. government at its highest level, the Sicangu Itancan (leader) caught a brief glimpse of the future of the Sicangu.

Sinte Gleska PhotoWhat he foresaw in the twentieth century, due to the deteriorating condition of the Lakota and the extremely aggressive policies of the U.S. government, was shocking. Based on this observation and reaction, Sinte Gleska revealed that unless the Lakota were able to cope with this situation, they would not survive as a people. This need for survival prompted him to stress and advocate the idea of accepting the minimal, but basic, aspects of the Wasicu tool of education for survival in the white dominated world. He optimistically envisioned that a certain portion of the Lakota population would master the Wasicu basic skills of learning, and eventually these people would supplant the untrustworthy Wasicu working as clerks, translators, and other agency officials. This would then ensure the survival of the Lakota.

Sinte Gleska faced difficult obstacles in carrying out his idea of survival in the White dominated world. One obstacle was to sell and implement this radical idea to people divided by an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and jealousy. He quickly overcame this by sending his reluctant grandchildren to Carlisle, in Pennsylvania, the first all‐indian boarding school sanctioned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Other Lakota headmen followed his example by sending their children and grandchildren to Carlisle. Later on, he withdrew his grandchildren because this system had no intention of stressing basic education that would satisfy the needs expressed by Sinte Gleska. Although this was a major setback for Sinte Gleska, he nevertheless raised one of the first and significant issues of bilingual and bicultural education. It was this concern that set the stage for the founding of Sinte Gleska University 100 years later.

25 On August 5, 1881, while Sinte Gleska was returning home from an important council meeting that voted to send him to Washington, D.C. to represent the Sicangu for an unprecedented third time, Crow Dog shot and killed the Sicangu leader. The motives behind the assassination and death of Sinte Gleska are complex, controversial, and so sensitive that, for the time being, no complete picture of what occurred can be drawn.

Today, Sinte Gleska lies buried on the crest of the nearest northern hill overlooking the Rosebud Agency, where the hub of activity between U.S. government and the Sicangu people is enacted on a daily basis, Here, too, stands Sinte Gleska University which embraces the lofty vision Sinte Gleska had for the people: that is to take up and master the skills of the White Man‐hecel oyate kin nipi kte (so that the people may live.)

‐Victor Douville SGU Lakota Studies Department

Lakota negotiations with Euro‐Epistemologists have been fraught with suffering and difficulty, and many choices between bad outcome and worse outcome. Still, the Lakota survive.

>>>

The Tibetan “Sand Painting” Ceremonial Mandala (also see, related, Navajo, Indigenous Australian and others): This medium is much documented, because Tibetan monks in recent years have produced these mandalas in many public cultural forums in the West. Videos and still images in great number are readily available on the web. Texts exploring the subject have been published, such as Tibetan Religious Art (Gordon).

The Kalachakra Sand Mandala

26

Comparative Model (Epitemological)

I will not create a textual construct describing the Epistemology of Collective Seeing in the European tradition. I am assuming that most of the readers will already be familiar with it. The form is pervasive throughout the now‐global social topology. It is the “classroom.” My illustration of it does incorporate Drucker’s Window, for the purposes of this essay.

I will suggest to that the reader embark on a full dimensional analysis of the form. The E‐E model has an immediately obvious similarity to the martial formations of Greco‐Roman eras, which provides the dimensional inquisitor an excellent point of departure. It is worthwhile to mention that the ancient Egyptians also developed similar formations. The question is whether the form is a predictable expression of any social topology directed towards the Druckerian sin of collective lust for power.

I will also provide some images as inspiration:

A typical E‐E classroom arrangement (from the website of the Austrian resort Häuserl im Wald)

An excellent illustration from the Wildfire Games website. Note the logo in the bottom right corner.

27

Caption from the website nyc‐architecture.com, “New York in Black and White” gallery: “Federal Crowd Control, 1918. Machine guns in front, modified phalanx. Soldiers on sides assigned to upstairs windows. Wilson feared antiwar riots, losing mind to small strokes.” Note the “cell” or modular quality. In Western warfare, this is a modification of the original hoplite formation, designed for optimum effect against heavy calvary, first optimized by William Wallace at the Battle of Sterling. Also worth noting is the Manhattan grid layout, a social topology designed with effective crowd control in mind. A single policeman can visually monitor activity on a cross‐section of the grid from a singular rotational vantage on any corner.

The Phalanx weapons system on the USS Wisconsin (usswisconsin.org)

One conjecture that evolved instantly from comparing the circular collective vision construct with the Epistemological one is whether the E‐E construct, as a martial device, is a design specifically invented for maximum effectiveness against the circular construct. The circular construct is designed for seeing, not warfare. The evolution of the phalanx is more complex in its topology, as a dual‐use device effective in E‐E educational management and as a tactical martial form. As noted, the geometry of the phalanx in its sequential derivations and iterations has proved especially effective when the plane of operations is a grid, and movement is restricted to linear directional.

28 The topology of the circular form, however, is predisposed to inward and outward directional movement, although this movement is not restrively 3D (or linear physical, as opposed to audio‐visual).

A comparison of the two types of collective vision processors surely demonstrates the greater effectiveness of the circular (open) form over the rectangular (enclosed) form. If we populate the E‐E model with Drucker and his followers, we can see that Drucker’s vision (looking out the window in the protective architecture) is almost entirely limited. Clearly, such a demonstration is simplistic, but the underpinnings of the example are realistic, in dimensional terms. The dualism of E‐E visionary transmission coupled with a martial application is not only historically accurate, it is in structural extension practically inevitable. The totality of the E‐E form has repeatedly proven to be causative in the world’s most disastrous manmade effects over the past several thousand years. The potential damage from those effects is now global in scale.

To extrapolate the broader architecture of the Epistemological vertical hierarchy is one of the secondary purposes of this essay, since Peter Drucker is a prime example of that hierarchy, and the critical analysis he proposes in “A View of Japan” is sufficiently influenced by that hierarchy, if not dictated by it. It is impossible, therefore to comprehend the flawed components in his arguments without first elucidating his contextual references.

As Peter Drucker might suggest (but didn’t):

• For whom is Peter Drucker writing? • What need is he satisfying? • What is his critical mission? • What is the most effective means for achieving that purpose? • (Most importantly) Who does Peter Drucker harm – who does he not harm?

A dimensional analysis of Peter Drucker, beginning with the Japan essay as a point of departure, is at the minimum uncovering the truth that such questions do not necessarily align with the general Epistemological profile of .

As a point of potential interest, on the other side of the sphere (of the dimensional inquiry into Drucker’s Japan essay: it is patently unethical for an art critic to positively review art that the critic owns or from which he can personally benefit. I know I’ve tried it before. An (epistemological) mind can rationalize anything.

29 ON VISION AND ACTION

"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." ‐ Frederick Douglass, (Letter to an associate, 1849)

“The social environment is the cultural medium of criminality; the criminal is the microbe – an element that becomes important only when it finds a medium which will cause it to ferment. Every society has the criminals it deserves.” – Lascussagne (Eugene V. Debs, Walls and Bars)

For although the means of coming into power differ, still the method of ruling is practically the same; those who are elected act as if they were breaking in bullocks; those who are conquerors make the people their prey; those who are heirs plan to treat them as if they were their natural slaves. ‐ La Boétie, (Discours de la Servitude Volontaire, quote from Rothbard, “Ending Tyranny without Violence”)

Prelude (Artist Statement)

Research for this project has been Deleuzian. Central influences have ranged from Aristotle (especially the Cave, and writings specific to art), to the critical work of Don Judd, and the many texts assigned by my CGU professors in the art department and the Drucker/Ito School. Informal and formal exchanges with hundreds of people in a plethora of diverse cultural and educational contexts have crystallized content and verified notions or discounted them, when a reply from a dead or otherwise unavailable author has not been forthcoming.

During the course of thinking about the subjects of seeing, representation, dimensionism, identity, cultural commerce, the convergence of math with art and science, freedom, tyranny, control, interpretation, optics, objects, perspective, form, dualism, critique, exhibition, art production (solo), accountability, multiplicity, collectives, economics, Democracy, spirituality and so on, I have tried to leave behind me markers for meme trackers. I’ve used blogs, twitters and other electronic means to do so.

I have also backtracked to revisit many of the influences that have shaped my vision on these matters over the years. It has been a pleasure to meet Yvor Winters again, for example, who, thanks to Notre Dame poetics professor John Matthias, first convinced me that form was reasonable, and clarity matters.

The self‐analysis assigned in Craig Pearce’s course at CGU (Organizational Behavior), and the artist statements assigned and edited by David Pagel for my MFA Thesis, though, required a far more personal inquisition as to meaning, that autoportraiture proves is seldom reasonable, but more profoundly formational, in terms of vision. Sorting through volumes of slides, CDs of images, documents and

30 sounds, videos, catalogs for uploading to online archives has forced a renewal of intimacy with the people, institutions, concepts and narratives that have driven output and collaborations undertaken since the early 80’s, and in some cases, earlier.

This process, of transmerging content with context, has entailed a balance between creative isolation punctuated by periods of intense participation in current events. Some of these have been general, others self‐generated. Secondary analysis and produced or positioned congruence with the unfolding flow of material histories interweaves the difficult realms of media by medium. The art I make represents the findings. New works have been exhibited, productions completed and stories written.

I have immersed myself in the flow of information emanating from socio‐political and economic upheavals and reformations for many years now, but in the run‐up to writing my theses here, my review of discourse on the important issues involving contemporary American actions in the global theater has been daily and extensive. Glenn Greenwald has been a trusted voice in the wilderness of reality and cop shows, for instance, in my scan of media. For the first time I entered the fray as a regular commentator, through various new interactive forms provided by the journals of our day. I also contributed to the magazine I helped co‐found, Cantanker, on themes that bear on this paper’s theme.

That said, thousands of hours of web and media research don’t compare, in terms of immediacy, to a road trip across North America in the dead of winter, 2008, echoes of the dozens of transmigrations that preceded that particular one. The spectrum of views from the Road provides one with poignancy, whether the source is a stranger or family. The 2008 excursion was precipitated by my mother’s ill health, and featured my teenage son, in the passenger seat. On the one hand a stack of largely out‐of‐print labor history books, on the other a kid familiarizing himself with a digital camera and the great span of the continent. Providing the backdrop was the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency. The start and endpoint was Claremont.

I have catalogued the sources informing this work online and in other writings and will not attempt to assemble them again here. Whether visiting the Allosphere and an exhibit at UCSB of Marcos Novak’s installation there, pursuing Wagner and Perelman in the various formats available, or producing artwork that is representational of such far flung interests, I will yet insist that my concerns have been consistent over two and a half decades, evolving and in some practical measure documented. That documentation is available now to a greater extent on my websites. Much effort has been applied over the past several years to ensure that some object lineage attends the language offered the reader here. Additional material will be published soon, I hope, including a library of previously published reviews of exhibits, audio recordings of interviews with art professionals and

31 practitioners, and a series of texts, to list a few ingredients I intend to add to the gumbo. Such endeavors are time consuming, but worthwhile.

There are other narratives and influences, probably the most vital, about which there will be no disclosure or little. Suffice to say they are tribal, genealogical and spiritual. Finally, there are numerous contributed and culled citations throughout the narrative. It has been a tremendous gift to live in an age of access. The availability of information has progressed radically in my lifetime, and the sort of dimensional inquiries I conduct, though sloppy by the standards of the card catalog crowd of yore and now, happen in real time. For an artist, this is of tremendous value.

While I do not expect this disclaimer to be sufficient to qualify the ideas contained in this paper to the accomplished academics, who dedicate much effort to formatting and verifying in the course of their work, I present the disclaimer in order to establish an alternate legitimacy. My proficiency is not academic. My theories derive from application and participation, and sampling with relatively great horizontal and otherwise dimensional speed. They (my theories) are not primarily epistemological. They are technical. As such, the dimensional aesthetics that underpin the ideas outlined here are provable, and are meant for application in the making of things, or at least experiences, or even meaningful chains of realization. The conclusions I draw are really questions, then, or beginning points for further inquiry. They are presented as conditions for further exploration, and therefore should not be ever immune from inquiry themselves.

I do however wish to acknowledge and express my gratitude to all those who assisted me in the formation of a text that is intended to inspire. It is a wonder to live in a place and a time that provides an individual the opportunity, expensive as it may be, to divest himself for a while from the enforced machinations of the daily grind, to focus on a Big Picture. I hope I have used my space, time and resources wisely.

We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good. ­ John D. Rockefeller

The Problem with the Perceptual in Post­War Japanese Art

Sadamichi Hirasawa is the tempera painter of strange scenes and portraits who was convicted of committing mass murder by cyanide poisoning one afternoon during a 1948 bank robbery, in what became known as “The Teigin Incident.” The ignominious case received widespread attention. There were even rumors of

32 military experiments (mind control of the Manchurian Candidate variety by infamous Unit 731).

From the NY Times obit, when the convicted painter passed away in 1987:

In the robbery, a man posing as a Government health worker entered a Teikoku Bank branch and told 16 employees that post‐World War II occupation forces had ordered them to drink medicine because of an outbreak of dysentery. The workers obeyed, and, as they collapsed, the robber scooped up the equivalent of $600 and fled.

Hirasawa confessed, but later contended his admission of guilt was a result of police torture. Surviving witnesses failed to recognize Hirasawa, then recanted that testimony. At any rate, Hirasawa was to die in prison after more than three decades on death row, setting the record for time on that block.

From a Bloomberg account:

Hirasawa, 56 at the time of his arrest, was an award‐winning tempera painter, known for popularizing the medium in Japan. Called ``The Painter of Horizons'' for his dramatic desolate landscapes, Hirasawa featured in the prestigious exhibitions of the Imperial Academy (now the Japan Art Academy).

…The artist was diagnosed with Korsakoff's syndrome, which can cause memory loss, blackouts and confabulation.

The murders took place in a suburb of Tokyo. From the Sydney Morning Herald (2003):

For an already demoralised society, the shock of this mass murder was profound. So it was with a general relief that Tokyo heard eight months later that Sadamichi Hirasawa, a famed artist, had been arrested and confessed.

The family and supporters of Hirasawa continue their efforts to clear the tempera painter’s name. So far, they have failed.

This case contains everything about Japan and Japanese art that Peter Drucker’s essay does not. It also illustrates the problem of defining Japanese art as perceptual, at a time when the Japanese system of cultural controls, in place since ancient times, was in flux. The post‐Bellum era was just getting underway, and this established Japanese artist was facing a conundrum. The Western Style of the 1880’s had been displaced by a new, America form of artistic expression, directly attuned to the principle of free speech. Jackson Pollack was smashing open the perceptual doors on the other side of the world, while Hirasawa (or the murderer) was plotting his crime.

33 Maybe and unfortunately, the America’s not‐yet visible socio‐economic/political control structure, attached to the military occupation like a ramora to a shark, had attached to Japan, too. Democratic principles were not so free or clear, at least not by 1948.

Drucker is not fond of the abject.

Anomalies and Exceptions

The realm of art is an odd one. In some ways it is as ineffable as humanity itself. On the one hand, art should focus on the sublime. On the other hand, it revels in the obscene, or so the ancient dualistic narrative goes. One account of Hirasawa’s story contended that the money the police found in his possession upon arrest was the fruit of a side business in erotic art. Japan, even through the Tokugawa period, contains a rich and diverse heritage in dirty pictures, a notation also missing in Drucker’s analysis.

In America, mass murder is a common enough happening. Most often, it is the result of a divorce industry that is as successful as nearly any in the land. Drucker discussed casuistry and Henry VIII, but as far as I can uncover, never reflected on the pressures married couples experienced as the result of the new organizational dynamics championed by Drucker. Even though most marriages ending in divorce do so because of financial duress, it’s rarely admitted by free marketers that what’s good for the shareholder or consumer may be rotten for the nuptials of the society of every class. Or that horrific bloodshed is a feature of the dissolution of divorce‐ afflicted families. Or that divorce in some ways is good for the bottom line of the overarching economy. During the writing of this essay, a man dressed in a Santa Claus costume to kill a small clan of ex‐relatives. Social rage, accountability and economics do not commingle in Drucker’s window view.

I mention divorce though, not as a harangue on Drucker’s selective vision, but to point out a feature of American artistic selectivity. There is no art market that I know of for contemporary paintings exploring the emotional drama of the divorce epidemic, its causes or conditions. I made some in the backwash of despair following a bad outcome in a custody battle in the 90’s. A gallery director in Santa Fe curated the work into my first retail show of significance in a dedicated venue. The business folded the month after my exhibit. My dealer assured me it had nothing to do with my art.

Anecdotes aside, which is more obscene, the divorce industry or the so‐called erotic drawing? How does society determine obscenity? In America, we have the Mapplethorpe and Serrano cases for illustration, but there are many other less famous instances, when offence is taken by a person, sect or entity, and political action is taken to extirpate the offensive artwork from the social concourse. Were

34 “Piss Christ” and the Mapplethorpe pictures worth the eradication of the NEA individual artist grants by Jesse Helms and crew? Falwell and Helms are both dead, but there is still no direct support for America’s artists from the government. The days of the WPA artist are long gone.

The reader should recall that the government in the period of the implementation of New Society endowments for artists created one of the most productive periods of art in the nation’s history. The several programs under Roosevelt’s administration produced 5,000 jobs for artists and over a quarter of a million public artworks, some of which have become recognized as national treasures. These programs paved the way for America’s rise to prominence in the art world. Thomas Hart Benton was a WPA painter. Later, he became the mentor for one Jackson Pollack. America has many art schools today. The best art program the country has ever produced was funded and administered by the government and yielded to date the most innovative work by artists in our history, artists who went on to redefine art as a democratic expression of freedom. Without the WPA, PWAP and FAP, there would not have been a Jackson Pollack.

Today, under the newly elected President Obama, in an economic downturn that has weakened the grip of the financial barons to the extent that talk of a new WPA might be established, America faces a quandary. The de‐definition of art by forces opposed to American representation have been so successful in their campaign that a cowed cultural class is no longer even capable of designating art in terms of quality or type.

Art is vital to our collective survival. We had better determine what American art is, and how to afford it its proper place in the collective.

Transthetics

Transthetics is the study of how dimensional collectives work.

Nowhere in his voluminous writings that I’m aware did Peter Drucker celebrate or promote American art. This is astounding, given that few could claim to owe more than Drucker to the democracy that afforded him:

• First, asylum and protection • Second, a platform for the free dissemination of his ideas, • Third, the wealth accorded an intellectual of his stature, and • Finally, a home and community secure from the ravages of despotism of the sort Drucker abhorred.

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Instead, Peter Drucker built a career on the restriction of government in general, the effect of which was the weakening to the point of extinction the very democracy that provided him the freedoms he enjoyed. Those freedoms were paid for in blood and collective sacrifice. Another fact I do not recall Peter Drucker, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2002, ever mentioning. In The End of Economic Man, Drucker mocks such sacrifice by Italian and Nazi soldiers, and the heroism assigned to it by those failed movements while they were succeeding, and even more so as they began to lose.

At any rate, Drucker’s heroism in the face of Nazi power was the writing of essays that were censored by the national socialists. Writing essays is not equivalent to the taking up of arms.

One man should never question another’s courage in the face of threat. One never knows how one will act from conflict to conflict.

Still, Drucker’s subsequent disregard for the heroism of those who did rise up to defend democratic freedoms against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan is problematic. The reason is what they fought for. American and British and the rest of the young men and women who engaged in combat or other violent resistance to the Axis forces, whose movements shaped the destiny and vision of Peter Drucker in many aspects, deserve more than Drucker’s blanket ambivalence to their sacrifice.

Heroism did not die because Nazi soldiers exhibited it in wartime, during the Nazis’ brief stint as masters of Continental Europe. No matter what realizations Drucker might have gleaned from that horrible episode in history, individual heroism in defense of the collective is as valuable today as it ever has been, perhaps more so. It would be arrogance for any intellectual of Drucker’s era to suggest that a strong economic analysis and supporting conservative, Christian commentary could sufficiently temper, deflect or defeat the advance of the inspired armies of a charismatic, mad dictator like Hitler.

If Drucker later decided he possessed the means to avert another such calamity, by virtue of sound economics and governance; the diminishment of government to a complementary or supportive arm of a tripartheid society; dominated by business interests; characterized by stability resulting from prosperity; containing a fulfilled and adaptive, educated and mobile Knowledge Worker; managed by ethical and uncharismatic, reasonable and concerned leaders ‐ history again revealed that this theory is not valid, nor is it sufficient to protect the people from harm. The facts are all around us.

The enemies of democracy are no less diverse when Drucker started his career. Probably the most dangerous among the enemies of democracy own the very corporations that Drucker may have imagined would save the world from World War 3.

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“The Art of ______”

“The art of ______” today is in large measure a corrupted and bankrupted descriptive phrase. Its remaining value is secondary. This phrase, if one researches its widespread usage, is valuable primarily to demonstrate the degradation of art as a collective formal discipline, and to demonstrate the need for reform of the field.

The first step in the reformation of art as a field is the definition of art. After one has defined art, one can establish who the artist is.

We have seen that art (especially dimensional realism, but also all art) is essential to our collective survival.

It is important to ask oneself, if one cares about the survival of the collective: Why would anyone or any entity oppose this basic, pragmatic and productive task?

The next step is to identify who opposes art (which is essential to sustainability of society) as a defined form and the artist as a defined member of the collective, and to ask how the opposition benefits from the de‐definition of art, at the expense of the collective.

It then becomes possible to see the function(s) of art.

Founding Fathers on the Subject of the Value of Arts to the Nation & Individual (From the NEA Chronology)

John Adams, in a letter to his wife (1780), writes:

I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture.

Thomas Jefferson writes to James Madison (1785): “You see I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts.”

President George Washington declares (1788) that both “arts and sciences are essential to the prosperity of the state and to the ornament and happiness of human life.”

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On Leadership

The great leader is impossible to control. He contains himself for the good of the people.

A great leader is charismatic naturally. He is incremental in his movement.

The great leader is time and site specific. His wisdom is not.

A great leader shares his thoughts with everyone and no one at the same time.

A society too big for its leaders is doomed.

The great leader knows his people, because he is one of them.

The people recognize a great leader. They also know when his time is over.

All leaders are expendable. The people are not.

Certainly, Drucker’s disdain for the heroic carried over to his propositions for corporate management. His ridiculous crypto‐definition of a leader as someone with followers is incorrect.

A leader is someone who does the necessary thing at the right time.

Focusing on leadership is itself wrong. It assumes organization over the individual as an animated agent of a collective of individuals. It precludes the very notion of democracy.

In democracy, artists are heroic when it’s their turn.

(1955) President Eisenhower, in his State of the Union address, advocates the establishment of a Federal Advisory Commission on the Arts: “In the advancement of the various activities which would make our civilization endure and flourish, the Federal government should do more to give official recognition of the importance of the arts and other cultural activities.”

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Ike was a wartime leader who surprised the war manufacturers with his views on wartime and peacetime leadership, and their respective values.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence ‐‐ economic, political, even spiritual ‐‐ is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military‐industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

If Drucker failed to distinguish between the sacrifices of American soldiers in World War 2 and those of our enemies, both in effect and meaning, Eisenhower did not. It is revealing that Eisenhower, whose rise to political power was driven by organizational leadership during war, used his final address to the nation to caution against the business of war. This seems a different hierarchy of heroism in relation to the amoral nature of business, which calls profit “profit,” whether it grows from blood or husbandry.

Perhaps the manmade global cataclysms initiated in Europe in the 20th Century were precipitated by the heroism and demonizing Drucker goes on to examine in his first book. Or perhaps they were rooted in the madness of European Epistemological rigor, the verticality of its hierarchies and its objective dualism, especially in matters of economics and war.

Drucker hardly mentions war in “A View of Japan through Japanese Art.” It seems a remarkable omission. He speaks briefly of competition and mentions a castle, but neglects to point out the martial nature of Japanese social ecology with clarity, to a reader who may or may not have known what a shogunate was. Certainly most readers at the time of the writing would have known Japan mainly through war, or through the post‐War industriousness of that nation. Japan’s art, and this was a part of a programmed exchange to be sure (which was coming into flower when Drucker wrote his essay and is in full bloom today) had been a business concern since the 1880’s in America. However, the proportional nature of Japanese art relative to the Japanese war machine has even yet been hardly explored.

39 The Meiji period produced a Japanese “art” that fit into Western categories, but mainly consisted of curios. The 20th Century version of Japanese art resulted from a well‐funded academic and cultural push on the part of the Japanese to invent a valid, if managed, Japanese branded perspective on Japanese art, valuable as a cultural export, and part of a broader program to expand global appreciation of Japanese cultural interests, in support of economic ones. Drucker’s essay is in that vein. An excellent essay on the subject is Tomoko Nakashima’s “Defining ‘Japanese Art’ in America,” for the Japanese Journal of American Studies (No. 17, 2006).

A Brief Inserted Notational Essay on America’s Dimensional Art, Its Pragmatic Value, and the Nature of the Opposition

To argue that 4 Dimension, or dimensionist art, is an aesthetic unicorn or basilisk, ineffable and without substance or basis in pragmatic concourse, is to engage in the worst form of denial, to use the psychological term. Four‐dimensional models have been applied to economic production in the West for nearly a century.

Drucker cites Marshall McLuhan in “Japan Through the Lens of Japanese Art,” but he does so dismissively, and he does so harmfully. To comprehend the necessity of dimensionist thought and its value for our collective survival, one only has to examine a document like “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency.”

To ignore the demand for advanced dimensionist thinkers almost certainly ensures the demise of the West. Marshall McLuhan foresaw this and called for science and humanities to reform, to coalition for our common welfare.

The West is now dependent on the Internet and electronic processes to the extent that the entire civilization could be damaged monumentally, if not destroyed, by a well‐conducted cyber attack. The worst threats are economic and criminal, although the most dangerous scenarios involve enemy governments. Terrorists, more concerned with violence and bloodshed, ironically enough, do not pose a significant threat. Recent cyber‐incursions by the Chinese have conclusively demonstrated the systemic exposure.

Throughout history (Leonardo is a wonderful example), artists have proved immensely valuable in the area of martial invention. In the modern age, one can look at World War 2 for examples. My favorite is the Allies’ use of props to deceive the Axis as to troop concentrations prior to the European invasion.

In fact, war production and art have always been intertwined, since the dawn of man. Rather than shooing away the dimensionist artist today, decision‐makers would do well to investigate his work. Of course, this is true of other disciplines that are advancing rapidly because of successful applications of dimensionism. For instance Perelman’s advances in mathematics, enabled by 4D instruments, or the

40 dimensional management evaluation tools used in monitoring and allocating supply to meet consumer demand in the domain of Internet retailers. These mathematical and industrial engineering advances have probably received more serious attention from military scientists than similar advances in the field of visual arts. For one thing, politicians and scientists alike must overcome deep prejudices just to consider such a shift in the hierarchy of Seriousness.

The attendant reason is that art production must involve a spiritual recognition. Any other sort of “art” is little more than impotent commentary. Unfortunately, all one must do is review the Marxian movements of the past century to recognize that this is what constitutes the establishment identity in the art world. It does not require much more effort to determine to whose benefit this status quo accrues, and what the interference between disciplines entails: stagnation of innovation in the new media facets of national defense.

The interference also subverts the nation’s appreciation of why we fight, when we must. Free speech in a democracy attains its pinnacle in visual art. One must only ask who would benefit from control of the medium. The short answer: anyone who has it. It would be wrong to assert that multinational corporations command or control art. It would be more accurate to say that free speech has been monopolized by the forces who derive power and wealth from the globalist economic structure, or New World Order, as it is.

To understand the operation of command and control over the mechanisms of free speech, especially art, requires more subtlety. One must understand that corporate structure is designed fundamentally to protect owners from risk. It also provides wealth for them without requiring direct labor on the owner’s part. This is a paradigm opposite the interests and mechanisms of national self‐defense for the democracy. In a democracy, the citizen army is responsible for the nation’s defense.

In the world of contemporary art, the Marxian academic is the enforcer of the globalist agenda. He does the dirty work of message selection and defense against message loss, often for next to nothing in terms of money. These gatekeepers are more often than not driven by ideology and hunger for potency. They also typically love wealth enough to be satisfied by proximity to‐ and the accoutrements of it.

The crumbs from the cake are sufficient, for a Marxian seated at the table and endowed to speak with his mouth half full.

America’s cultural interest in Japan resulted primarily from our having been at war with Japan. Japan’s interest in cultivating America’s cultural appreciation is more complex. Nonetheless, to pretend as if war (or the threat of it) and martial art is not the predominant expression of cultural exchange between East and West over the past century is ludicrous, unless one’s interest is economic, and one is not concerned

41 about defining qualities of nations and their governments, such as body counts or borders, heroism or societal control.

Art as the West defines it did not exist in Japan prior to the latter’s encounter with the former in the 19th Century. Further, the movement to establish a cultural category of “Japanese Art” did not gain institutional establishment in the West or East until the post‐bellum era. Most of the West, if it did so at all, thought of the Samurai sword first, when it thought of Japanese art, and for good reason.

The “art” Drucker describes in his essay is not art at all. It is the product of edification for elite warrior classes, clans, and warlord families. To suggest differently is to deceive. To compare the works Drucker suggests outshine the modern art of the West to those actual artworks is an abuse not of Japanese cultural production, but of the definition of art, especially the definition of post‐ Revolutionary art.

Japanese does not bear comparison to American art not because American art or Western art is inferior. American art as a tradition is founded on principles of free speech that did not exist conclusively in Japan until the US defeated the Japanese in World War Two. The two cases are simply not relative.

This is certainly not to say that Japanese cultural production is not replete with creative and technical genius. One of my favorite examples of creative and technical genius from the dimensionist perspective, as a proof of what’s possible in the realm of the impossible, is the Japanese Samurai sword, which, when inspected under an electron microscope, exhibits no discernible edge. The implications of this are profound.

The spirituality of Japan is nowhere better viewed than in the process by which a Samurai sword is made. An October 9, 2007 episode of NOVA on PBS did a tremendous job summarily chronicling the dynamics that shape the creation of one the deadliest martial instruments the world has ever seen: the Samurai blade. On the one hand, we have a swordmaker intimately aligned with natural and spiritual forces and masterfully proficient at managing the highly refined manufacturing procedures, passed down for generations since the 10th Century. On the other hand, we have a society, whose heart is Bushido, which evaluates the quality of a sword by slicing through the bodies of criminals. A five‐body sword is the finest. The Samurai sword is spoken of as the soul of the Samurai.

From the NOVA transcript:

Ken Kraft, a professor of religion and an expert on medieval Japan, says this reverence helps explain why the sword is so important in Japanese culture:

Around the whole world, in 1700, the Japanese were the masters of this particular technology that produced swords. So we have to remember we're dealing with a

42 culture in which the military dominated for 4‐ or 500 years. That gave them a lot of time to perfect whatever military implements they wanted.

FUMON TANAKA (Samurai Grand Master): I think many Japanese people can still find the spirit of the Samurai in their hearts. We have started to judge everything with money, or if you own a big house, or drive a nice car. But the spirit of the warrior was different. Honor was more important; to give your best at all times was important. This is the spirit of Bushido that we should not forget.

GASSAN SADATOSHI (Swordsmith): The creation of this line doesn't just show the skill of the swordsmith, it's also an expression of his creativity, and it gives every sword a unique character.

I am surprised that Peter Drucker missed this essential element of Japanese social ecology. The real question about Japanese society, in the aftermath of World War 2, is not whether some perceptual, spiritual or conceptual metric can be attained. It is how the expression of Bushido, a brutal but technically masterful science linked tangibly to the ancient animism of the Japanese people, its primary connection to the land, can transform to meet the new threats of global homogenization in the pursuit of productivity and effectiveness. The abandonment of family and clan alliances and protocols, a sophisticated hybrid form of tribal vision and feudal control, a proud history of heroic combat – in exchange for cultural moderation and best business practice; this seems a potentially insurmountable task for a fierce warrior people. They can look to the Scots and Lakota, among many others, to learn what to do and what not to do. In the final analysis, it will not matter if the Japanese are perceptual. What will matter is their stubbornness and endurance.

AFTERWORD

Some Thoughts on Leadership in a Dimensionist Collective (Realism)

A lead artist in 4D dimensionist collective, founded in realism, is a leader in name and by action. He doesn’t actually lead. His mission is to inspire. His goal is to select, direct and facilitate artists who will act as free agents by choice along an agreed‐to collective path of inquiry.

The object is unanimous. The means of getting there is independent.

Because (dimensional realism) production is identical to the scientific approach, failures are more than likely. They are normal.

It is essential that the lead artist choose participating artists based on the likelihood of their success, based on their strengths, based on their maturity or potential for

43 maturity. Maturity means dealing reasonably with failure. Dealing reasonably with failure means accepting it and learning from it in the course of a progressive exploration.

A progressive exploration (dimensionist production) achieves and documents results. The participants are responsible for their own results, and progress.

The lead artist is an assistant in that progress.

He should be capable of demonstrating the patterns of operation that a production requires.

Therefore, his workflow and choices need to be transparent and repeatable.

He should complete his artwork, at least the majority of it, early in the production, so the other participants can observe, correct, and build on the results. Obviously, the lead artist must be available for and open to critique*.

*NOTATION: Critique, as it relates to art production, is the management of artist content.

Visual art is an oral (invisible) tradition, as well as a visual and visible tradition. This is important to recognize for dimensional study of art. The topology then invites transparency on a variety of concerns, including language or dialect as a determinant of thought‐form (and vice versa), thematic arcs, types, memes, kernels, bytes and so on.

[(Please reference the circular collective vision construct for an abstracted dimensional expansion of the thought.) > Oral (or waveform/frequency transmissions) in a linear trajectory, as spokes on a collective wheel, combined to produce a survival‐oriented expression.] The symbiotic function of language in the circular collective form is not similar to the command and control function of language in the E‐E form.

As is true of any technical tradition passed down from generation to generation, oral transmission coupled with demonstration is the proven most effective form of ensuring not only the quality of technical processes of manufacture, but the passage or conduct of more subtle aspects of artisanal creativity. The swordmaker described in this text is a perfect example (as documented holistically in the NOVA episode).

The artisan assumes responsibility for transmitting to future generations of artisans, through the one(s) directly in his sphere both his means and values. It is therefore unsurprising that familiar or clan or guild orders are typically attached to artisanal lineage. Such tight‐knit affiliations organically conform to the rigors of

44 production, as well as the demands of craft excellence. Of course, in practical terms these affiliations also encourage exclusivity of procedural secrets, as in a competitive market. That discussion adds a layer of complexity that converges on critique in the Epistemological academy, which will receive some minimal elaboration in this paper, but will hopefully be expanded on thoroughly in another.

What does a technical master teach his apprentice? For one thing, the master instructs his student on those matters pertaining to animation (infusing spirit or otherwise manifesting the invisible or spiritual power into materials). Typically, the master artisan in any context other than the Epistemological Academy is possessed of an enormous body of data encompassing his social topology and the functions he and his work perform therein.

Critique today is the primary teaching tool in the Epistemological Art Academy. That is why masters emerging from them at the age of 25 or 26 who can’t paint or draw, unless they learned the fundamentals elsewhere, but they can proliferantly quote Foucault.

Critique, responded to correctly, not only improves the work and therefore the production, it increases the confidence of the collective. Critique in dimensional production is an opportunity to expand the discourse, from Epistemological to dimensional.

Critique or review is essential for the quality of the art and production. It will always inadvertently assist the dimensional artist in determining how meaning can be clarified and value improved.

The dimensionist artist must base his decisions on verifiable research. The more extensive the research, the greater likelihood of a strong outcome. Critique is subjective within the pretense of the objective. Critique is based on opinion, especially opinions other than the critic’s, if the work demands the intervention of higher, vertically removed authority, as in a potential threat.

The dimensional artist must be able to disclose his (many) sourcesthrough thorough and accessible documentation, when those sources are critical to the results as presuppositions in production. The dimensional artist must be capable of communicating to his collective the value he found in any source, or at least explain why he is yet unsure of the value, since the production is ongoing.

The critic is his own source, unless that is insufficient. If the secondary or tertiary sources are also insufficient to produce adherence, or management results, the critic will direct the dialogue to prohibition. Prohibitions include references to currency, taste, market sensibilities, so‐called normative values, enlightenment virtues and so on.

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In the art tradition, technical analysis is triangulated upon the artwork (or any Object “O”), if we can reduce the discussion to two viewers, for the purposes of clarification. The construct can be illustrated this way:

ANECDOTE: When Joseph Maciariello and I began to review this essay, we did so using this format for exchange. My favorite memory (of many competing choices) of working at Elaine Horwitch Galleries in Santa Fe in the late 1980s as an art handler and installer: Nick Sealy or John Guernsey (the resident mentors/established pros) playing critic and inventing completely ridiculous but plausible‐sounding critiques of artworks; on the fly, as a break from installing; including pantomimes of critic mannerisms and clichés; in such a way that Elaine wouldn’t notice we were goofing off.

In formulation 1 (Lula’s Proof), viewer one and two look at the artwork, which “communicates” to each viewer. The two viewers compare their experiences of the

46 artwork. In this structure, which dimensionally expands the bi‐circle arrangement of the collective circular vision form, from the function of survival to the medium of survival play. The artwork supplants the configuration of the Object + Seer (1 game rule). “Art” and “Viewer” are considered in parallel continua (2 game rule). The artist or society or art subject, etc. is manifested in the center of the triangulation (3 game rule). The more one knows about any element in the configuration, the productive and fun the “game” is.

In formulation 2, the hierarchy is rotated to place the critic in the position of the artwork. The discourse is a form of confrontation. The critic becomes a manager of the perceptual and conceptual framework in which art is but a role player. Typical accompaniments include philosophy, reducible mechanics, operational analysis, psycho‐analysis, culture studies (in the E‐Academic usage), linguistics (ditto), politics, gender or racial issues, etc. These are weapons for the re‐ or de‐definition of art into any compartment other than the technical.

47 Countless gambits have evolved over centuries of Epistemological critique to divert power from the technical to the E‐narrative, the vertical hierarchy: God, obscenity, etc.; or the reactive argument to the vertical hierarchy, which does nothing to dislodge the vertical hierarchy. If all else fails, as it did last century, the critic can try to convince the viewer he is the artist just by looking at the art. Some artists have been complicit in this gambit, which is overtly ridiculous. Only an Episteme could argue the truth of it.

As we have seen, however, the critic is only as viable as the purpose he serves in the Epistemological framework. A technical or dimensional critic, on the other hand is essential to improving performance. Such a critic is familiar with technical evolution and can comment intelligently on it. The technical critic can comment on functionality. Usually, such critics are masters in their own right. An Epistemological critic is a master of nothing but criticism, which is dysfunctional in every respect but the management of perception and conception.

Research or research approach must also be available for dimensional review, but more importantly as a production aid, as in the databank. This is the same in art and science in terms of technical practice.

Critique has nothing to do with finding of fact. Journalism is not critique. In Epistemology the objective and subjective are divorced. Realistic and dimensional investigation is essential to democracy. So is the right to express thoughts. The two provide for the refinement of perceptual along the lines of realism. In principle they are not structurally inclined to obfuscation. Obfuscation has to be intentionally injected into the process. That is the realm of the Epistemological.

It is helpful to have witnesses, when anecdotal sources are used in dimensional research. Straw men and anonymous sources are the hallmarks of Epistemological reportage. Character assassination is resolutely Epistemological. Admittedly, these are broadsides, but I deal with them robustly elsewhere in other available texts, and below in this one.

The lead artist should save some work for the closing period of the production, in order to provide a unifying component to the collective presentation, if necessary or appropriate.

In a democracy, each individual is expected to do the necessary thing at the right time, starting with the vote. A collateral damage precipitated by Drucker’s anti‐

48 democratic bent is the production not of a nation of knowledge workers, but a nation of followers. Rush Limbaugh calls them “dittoheads.”

Dimensional Realism and Democracy

Dimensional Realism is a democratic art form.

The first meeting of the National Council on the Arts convenes at the White House with President Johnson swearing in the members:

Our civilization will largely survive in the works of our creation. There is a quality in art which speaks across the gulf dividing man from man and nation from nation, and century from century. That quality confirms the faith that our common hopes may be more enduring than our conflicting hostilities. Even now men of affairs are struggling to catch up with the insights of great art. The stakes may well be the survival of civilization.

Limbaugh is a cultural icon for the society of organizations that did emerge from Drucker’s success as an ideologue. He is a $50 Million Man. He is charismatic only to his followers, whom he has led to disgrace and despair. To the rest of us, he is a buffoon, a dreadful role model, and a hack for failed economic and political policy. He is the amplified voice of corporate monopoly in global imperialist social reactionary America.

I’ve heard Rush Limbaugh (and other pundits of the Right) harangue against art and artists. There is great receptivity among conservative Christians to such screeds. Later in this essay I discuss the leverage Rudy Giuliani gained with social conservatives in America, as a result of Giuliani’s opposition to the exhibition “Sensation.” Jesse Helms generated tremendous support for his attacks on the NEA patronage of Mapplethorpe and other controversial artists. Helm’s campaign (with support from Alfonse D’Amato and others in Congress) in the late 80’s resulted in the eradication of NEA grants for individual artists. The way was cleared for the Republican Congressional gains of 1994.

To understand what American culture has lost by de‐funding individual artists, one only has to look at recipients from 1967, shortly after the program commenced: Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Manuel Neri, Tony Smith, H. C. Westermann and Ed Ruscha. These are today recognized as some of the most distinguished and innovative American artists.

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President Johnson signs P.L. 89‐209, the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, September 29, 1965:

“Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Drucker concerned himself with the leadership of organizations. Other economists from the Austrian school, from whom Drucker disassociated himself, focused on ownership, as the foundation for social ecology. This led to some extreme moral vagaries, which nonetheless are indicative of the American democratic experiment.

Disputes between those who wish to pronounce government less credible or worthy of trust than business, driven by organizational or property interests, predate the formation of the Revolutionary republic in North America. The case of William Penn and Pennsylvania is one of my favorites. I especially enjoy Murray Rothbard’s version for its idiosyncratic subtext.

Rothbard’s framing of the rebelliousness of Pennsylvania’s early European settlers in terms of anarchy is resonant with Drucker’s self‐definition as an anarchist. Perhaps this is the sort of anarchy Drucker was thinking of, when he called himself a “conservative Christian anarchist,” and maybe he was pointing out common ground with Rothbard accidentally.

Rothbard was openly discredited by prominent conservatives, such as William F. Buckley, who wrote a scathing obituary upon Rothwell’s passing. The list of alliances (Ayn Rand, Buckley, Pat Buchanan, to name several) Rothwell entered into – and fell out of ‐ to shape American conservative political discourse is interesting, not for the partisan fractures they produced. In a smear campaign of marginalization as effective as any Lee Atwater might contrive, Rothwell was characterized as a racist, for his contention that property rights might be conceived to extend to all social relationships among people. Extreme views on property rights likewise alienated him from advocates of conjugal independence and the rights of children. That Rothwell may have deserved censure for his arguments seems less a point of politics than a problem of humaneness, or empathy over idea.

That this seems a redundant characteristic for conservative ideologues suggests why Bush marketers felt compelled to push “Compassionate Conservative” branding.

The convergence of Drucker and Rothbard in the conservative American mashup of post‐War economics and social discourse is faceted. Recent Presidential candidate

50 Ron Paul is a descendent or product of Ludwig von Mises and Rothbard. His success as a candidate stymied a Republican arm of the conservative movement floundering in the wake of George W. Bush’s devastating Presidency. The current Austrian‐hued conservative response ‐ to re‐regulation of the financial industry post‐Bush, with comparisons of President Obama to Mussolini, for instance, and shrill approbations declaiming the success of the New Deal, and calls for protection of private enterprise from an invasive, failure‐prone, too‐powerful government ‐ is pervasive. It also owes much to both the Drucker, and not just to Rothbardian schools of conservative ideology.

Bush II as a conservative phenomenon seems to have been a conglomerate of Druckerian and Misian or Rothbardiian thought. Drucker’s description in “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” of artists breaking with schools and mentors, but subsequently maintaining close ties with them, is striking for its concurrence with the divergent arms of conservative Christian anarchists.

American conservatives, then, might best be graphically depicted in a likeness of Shiva. Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction,” which so inspired Drucker, would take on an entirely new and evocative image.

The other arms of conservatism – fundamentalist Christians, Southern racists, hawks for an Imperial America (neo‐cons) – are lopped off and regenerate cyclically, with every consolidation or loss of political and economic power. Disavowals of association appear in the managed media messaging apparatus whenever accountability is demanded by the people who suffer from the manipulations of these arms attached to a rooted conservative corpus.

From a functional or structural analytic perspective, this seems an incredibly resilient and effective model for longevity of “conservative values.” Perhaps this explains the longevity of conservative politics in America. An added wrinkle, from a dimensionist perspective, is the conflation of ideologies – economic, political and social, to use Drucker’s model – between the liberal and conservative wings of the political establishment.

Over the past several decades, concurrent with Drucker’s career, the differences between the two parties have congealed. It is often a matter of disputative convenience to point this out, whenever a partisan experiences the need to radicalize his base. The factual turgidity of the dualistic framework of American politics is nowhere more clear than in the protected incumbency of federal politicians, thanks to supportive gerrymandering provisions.

Only a few “wedge” issues divide the politicians and their constituencies, if one believes the media. Abortion, gay marriage, gun rights, for instance, are ritualistically trotted out like a dog and pony show to illustrate how unalike Democrats and Republicans are. This form of pantomime is particularly helpful

51 when a populist attacks the political elites for their bipartisan dependence on corporate dollars.

Social issues such as universal medical care devolve into free‐for‐alls of righteous indignation on both sides, with conservatives shouting against socialization and liberals shouting against political Darwinism, while nothing is done to remedy the problem. The beneficiaries are the massive insurance, pharmaceutical and managed care (arguably a Drucker invention) corporations, who invest massive sums to elect politicians and reelect them, to lobby them while in office, and shape voter perception on the issues – and the job performance of their elected officials.

“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” Bush intoned in the aftermath of 9/11. This is the normal frame for political discourse in a bi‐party system. The war against terror can never be concluded, for terror is not an army that will surrender. The either/or parameters brook no intervention of reason or caution against folly. The Orwellian implications have not been lost on all Americans and outside observers, but the powerful instruments of homogenized action coalesced against dissent, or even considered review, did not measure to the very real threat to democracy contained in Bush’s reproach. The results are all around us to see, eight years later.

A Short List of Means for Oppressing Dissent

1. Militarize the constabulary 2. Inhibit travel and communication (through intervention and cost) 3. Spy on the populace 4. Imprison without recourse (e.g., suspension of Habeas Corpus) 5. Torture 6. Obfuscate accountability 7. Mobilize the military to suppress any uprising (e.g., suspension of Posse Comitatus) 8. Control the message 9. Reward collaborators handsomely 10. Control food production 11. Encourage depictions of the ruler and his agents in sympathetic terms (8a.) 12. Hire mercenaries 13. Disempower social response and care 14. Destabilize the economic security of the citizenry 15. Empower the foreman and manager 16. Encourage internal conflicts (among classes, individuals, etc.) 17. Reward informants among the people, punish whistleblowers 18. Politicize justice and apply laws surreptitiously 19. Delegitimize art 20. Romanticize and otherwise celebrate or reward consent

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As a nation, it is true that we are struggling for survival. We are struggling to preserve the individual’s freedom to formulate doctrine free of imposed, undemocratic management. Each of us must distinguish between carefully managed and packaged “talking points” and one’s own unconditioned perceptions.

This is true for contemporary Japan, too.

NOTES

One of the functions of art is the development, refinement and clarification of the individual’s perceptual mechanisms, in order to improve his facility and effectiveness as a conceptual agent. Any system of perceptual management, based on achieving results, tailored to a consumer, is in direct contraposition to the aims of democracy. Individuals fluent in arts and science make good democratic citizens. Followers do not.

A world in which there are two choices (Pepsi or Coke, Terrorist or Patriot, Republican or Democrat) is not realistic. The only value for the establishment of such perceptual monopolies (tension between polar opposites or competitors) derives for the agency that benefits when either choice is made. In other words, dualistic systems behoove the one who is funneling gains into the least common denominators.

John Adams passionately discusses the Constitutional Convention of 1787:

“To be the Football of Faction, I never was, and never will be. I will neither be Rebel nor Despot: Aristocrate or Democrate and if the Brains of my Countrymen are so far turned, as to insist upon one or the other: I will be a private Man, and a Brewer of Compost for my Farm.”

One wonders if Peter Drucker saw himself as a romantic figure ‐ not unlike John Adams’ vision of himself as the man of principle, retired from the duel, a “Brewer of Compost” ‐ in Claremont far removed from the fray between this contingency and that. If so, his studied immunity was made possible only by the printing press and the armatures of free speech, not by the equally necessary apparatus of proportional accountability for the thinker and the doer, or maker.

Perhaps the manmade global cataclysms initiated in Europe in the 20th Century were precipitated by the heroism and demonizing Drucker goes on to examine in his

53 book. Or perhaps they were rooted in the madness of European Epistemological rigor, the verticality of its hierarchies and its objective dualism.

I have spent much of the last year investigating Peter Drucker, and exposing the flaws in his ideology and the work of his followers. I have confronted accomplished proponents of nonprofit arts hierarchies, and their curious definitions of art and artists, the missions of the organizations they administer and the manner in which they conduct the business of culture. I have explored how the art markets and the economic, political and social sectors intersect. I have confronted the Marxian critical theories, psychology and philosophy, the gender and culture studies academic elite, that undermine and debase the Western art canon they portend to be European, Capitalist, bourgeoisie, Christian, etc., and contend is failed and oppressive.

At this point, it is clear that the most necessary course to undertake is the re‐ definition of art and artist. My lens will be American and democratic, and dimensional.

Peter Drucker’s gift as an analyst lies in his ability to explore a given topic or subject dimensionally. The essay on Japanese art is notable for Drucker’s introduction of two important realms of dimensional study: the perceptual and the conceptual, by way of Reischauer. To begin this section of the paper, I would propose that management‐as‐a‐liberal‐art fails to encompass the most forward‐looking aspects of Drucker’s vision. Follow me.

The Humanities can be subdivided into four domains: the perceptual arts; the conceptual arts; the dimensional arts; and the technical arts. The study of art would be a technical art program, basically the study of painting, drawing and sculpture. To get a professional art degree would take two years. To get a full degree would require training in the perceptual, conceptual and dimensional arts and would take four years. Graduate studies would require a journeyman period as a prerequisite, four years in length, minimum. During those four years, the artist in training would spend a year looking, a year thinking, a year assembling and a year applying and presenting. The next eight years would be for apprenticeship. The artist would commit to at least four specialties, such as exhibits, pre‐production, sales, or teaching. The apprenticeship period following (two years) would be for advocacy, service to other artists in community‐based programs. Throughout this period of practical education, the artist would be expected to produce one solo exhibit and one collective exhibit each year. At the end of the training period the artist would commence an intensive practice of four to seven years in duration, consisting of a solo or collective exhibit every four months. Upon completing this intensive, the artist could choose to return to the academy for an additional four year program of combined aesthetics presentation and exhibitions (two over the four‐year span, one solo and one collective), during which the artist would teach a class a week and hold

54 a public lecture once each month. Having finished his artist requirements, the master in training would be offered a position at the academy, lasting five years, to be extended to ten or fifteen, with a review every five years. One year of each five‐ year period would be spent at another academy. His post would require a solo or collective exhibit (alternating) every two years. During the visitation year the artist would be required to hold an informal demonstration exhibit. Each year of the fifteen, the artist would offer one four‐month course, a lecture and a four‐week demonstration. The artist would also be required to be training at least one apprentice (ongoing). At the culmination of this fifteen‐year Masters course, the artist would be eligible to administer an academy, though he would not be required to do so. In fact, he would not be required to do anything again. He would be free to determine his own course and interests, and that of any artist who chose to follow him. The Master would be close to sixty at this point.

From the Handbook of the Economics of Arts and Culture (pg. 793‐4):

Uncertainty management techniques and learning processes related to the core of artistic invention on one hand, and to the market structure of competition among widely differentiated talents and products on the other, provide economic research with insights into the behavioral type of the artist. The artist may be portrayed neither as a conventional rational actor well‐equipped to survive in an ever more competitive market, nor as a myopic one induced to take occupational risks only because she forms probabilistic miscalculations of her chances of success or because she was programmed by her initial socialization to enter an artistic occupation. Rather, she may be portrayed as an imperfect Bayesian actor gathering information; learning by doing; revising her skills, expectations and conception of herself; building networks in order to widen her range of experiences; and acting without knowing her initial endowment of ability and talent or what she may be able to express over the course of her loosely patterned career. Insofar as she acts as a monopolistic supplier, the artist tries to expand the control over her own work and over the market of the goods or services she provides. However this outward‐ oriented goal, driven by the competitive pressure in the market for the arts and entertainment services, would be meaningless were it not matching the inward‐ oriented goal of self‐discovery and self‐actualization, a goal that may be pursued only as long as the variety of work experiences and challenges is optimal and if the balance between invention, security at work and temporary routine exploitation of innovation is secured.

7. Managing the risks of the trade

Studies of artistic occupations show how artists can be induced to face the constraints of a rationed labor market and how they learn to manage risky careers. Pioneering empirical research by Baumol and Bowen (1966) found that artists may improve their economic situation in three main ways which are not incompatible and may be combined: artists can be supported by private sources (working spouse, family or friends) or by public sources (subsidies, grants and commissions from the

55 state, sponsorship from foundations or corporations, and other transfer income from social and unemployment insurance); they can work in cooperative‐like associations by pooling and sharing their income and by designing a sort of mutual insurance scheme; and finally they can hold multiple jobs. Most studies, both in sociology and in economics, have focused on this last means, since apart from being widespread and becoming more so, it brings into light a puzzling feature of the artistic labor market: that of the diversification of risk through one’s own human capital and labor, which seems a much more unusual phenomenon than risk management in the financial sphere. In fact, it makes artists resemble entrepreneurs since, just as property owners spread their risk by putting bits of their property into a large number of concerns, multiple jobholders put bits of their efforts into different jobs [Dreze (1979)].

In his comparison of Eastern and Western art (page 6) ‐ which he suggests is abusive to the former – Peter Drucker fails even to mention any American painter by name, except Rothko, whose name appears in a cited book title by the mediocre academic, curator and critic Robert Rosenblum. Drucker’s omission is telling. It reveals Drucker’s prejudice against democratic art.

As for Rosenblum: he was behind the Rockwell show at the Guggenheim in New York. That should be enough to say. Drucker does not quite convey the gist of Rosenblum’s second‐tier elite academic niche. Rosenblum championed French artists first, then the Germans. Finally, he picked Rockwell. The critical response to the Rockwell show was underwhelming, and this was typical for Rosenblum’s efforts.

I saw the Rockwell exhibit, and it did his work no great service. Illustration does not do well in that vaunted hall, even illustrations executed by a draughtsman as adroit as Rockwell, with an eye as magnificent as his was. His medium, curtailed in service of the camera, prepared for reproduction and not the white wall of the modern gallery, appeared flat and dead. The few paintings did not rise to the arena’s presentation demands.

The Rockwell show was a critical bust and a popular success, for all the wrong reasons. It proved a tiresome exercise in brand push, and revealed the institutional failure of the Guggenheim to protect itself from the new museology. For expansion on this point, it would behoove the reader to visit the website of Odd Nerdrum and the blog established to advocate for his movement (worldwidekitsch.com).

As one might expect, the typical sort of Marxian froth of the New York critical environment, with its Buchlohs, Fosters and McEvilleys, would not brook Rockwell’s incursion on its turf, any more than it could acknowledge the passing of Andrew Wyeth this year.

56 When Drucker cites the marginal critic whose stupid claim is, as Drucker frames it, that “Western painting has its roots in the northern, mostly North German, painters of the early 1800s –Caspar David Friedrich and Otto Runge – who shifted from description to design,” one can only ask, “Who?”

If Peter Drucker had taken a moment, and stopped looking out his window at Japan and Europe, and thumbed through his Claremont phone book, he could have found worthier subjects for his considerable talent as a dimensional analyst. He could have called on Karl Benjamin, Walter Mix or James Hueter and arranged a studio visit. Drucker and the rest of us would have better served.

NOTES ON REDEFINING AND REGULATING ART

The Two Problems with American Democracy

1. Private Ownership 2. Dartmouth v. Woodward

From the Handbook on the Economics of Art and Culture (Pg. 871):

Copyright is therefore intimately tied up with the appropriation of artists’ human capital. Nor is this only a feature of artists’ labour markets; the growth of the ‘Information Society’ or the ‘Knowledge Economy’ and the spread of intellectual property law into ever more sectors of the economy have created similar conditions in other labour markets.

The Definition of Art (“A Good Place to Start” or Conjectures)

Art = Painting + Drawing + Sculpture

• Painting teaches the artist how to project imagination to the horizon; how to frame; how the infinite line erases the edge of the canvas and extends beyond and through the frame; how to compress layers of content; how to push and pull content; how to finish; the nature of endurance with care (outlasting life); the dual function (mirror and window); how to represent; + more • Drawing teaches the artist there is no such thing as wrong failure; the fundamentals of expansion and reduction; generative form and sequencing; positive and negative space and spatial arrangements; workflow; limitations

57 of endurance; the necessity of restraint; the immediacy of vision (eye to hand); what to represent; + more • Sculpture teaches the artist the realism of human scale; rotational perspective; exertion; the value of tools; the facets of content; planar thought; planning and execution; stress and materials; surface exposure and weathering; the directional quality of light and vision; the powerful hand (spirit); malleability and longevity; where to represent; + more

Regulation 1

Art critics must not own art.

Regulation 2

Artists must not sell art or artist services to the government. The art/service must be donated.

Regulation 3

Artists must not sell art or artist services to businesses. The art/service must be exchanged for the business’s products (at equal, retail value).

Regulation 4

Artists must not sell art or artist services to individuals. The art/service must be exchanged for food or lodging.

Regulation 5

Artists will not be required to pay taxes or pay for education.

Creativity and Art

Creativity is not art, but art is creative.

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Business and Art

Commercial art is not art. Commercial art means visual design that promotes the sale of a product. Regulation must be stringent (no advertising beyond the package containing the product, for example).

Artist Dissent and Cultural Controls (Example)

Famed sculptor Richard Serra and painter Fernando Botero created powerful artworks in response to the candid snapshots of American atrocities at Abu Ghraib. These artists and others used their social prestige and representational skills to communicate through stylized form and with ancient tools an absolutely current outrage, disgust and demand for reckoning. The art world, though is a befuddling monopoly, especially now that it has been broadly corporatized, and as I recall there was some discussion comparing the visceral impact of the photos to the art versions, and most people who knew about both in my artist circles kept mum about both. The general gist, to my astonishment, was that taking a political stance in the polarized climate of the culture wars was not a good career choice for an artist. I was in a graduate art program in California when this review of Botero’s Abu Ghraib series showed in San Francisco, not at SF MoMA, but at the main library of UC Berkeley. Here is an excerpt from the story in the Chronicle about the exhibit:

(Botero) said he wasn't intending to "shock people or to accuse anyone" with his Abu Ghraib depictions. He didn't do them for commercial reasons (they're not for sale). "You do it because it is in your gut, you are upset, you are furious, you have to get it out of your system."

Nonetheless, he hopes that as Abu Ghraib fades from memory ‐‐ the prison is slated for demolition ‐‐ the paintings will be a reminder of what happened there. "People would forget about Guernica were it not for Picasso's masterpiece," he said. "Art is a permanent accusation. "

The trickier question is why no U.S. museum chose to exhibit them. The only other place they have been shown in the United States was last November at New York's private Marlborough Gallery, which has been showing and selling Botero's work for decades.

Some museums may have had security concerns. Look at what happened to the Copabianco Gallery in San Francisco, which was forced to close in 2004 after it showed a painting depicting torture of an Iraqi detainee, and the gallery was vandalized and its owner assaulted.

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From the HOTEOAAC (Pg. 378):

The economic theory of culture therefore predicts that culture will adapt to the environment, both across space and over time. This accords with basic economic intuition that despite all the qualifications noted above, a successful culture must correspond closely to the realities of a situation facing a group. As circumstances change, so the optimal culture changes too and forces adaptation, driven by competition between rival leaders, come into play.

Artist Dissent and Cultural Compartmentalization (Anecdotal Example)

At CGU there was little buzz about this show or the war in general. My first installation at the college was vehemently anti‐war. The response from faculty was negative and critical. The students took their lead from their professors.

The Drucker School is a short walk from the CGU art building. I rarely encountered MBAs attending MFA shows. The rift is palpable, not on an individual basis, only institutionally. The separation is not visible, only seen.

From the HOTEOAAC (Pg. 378‐80):

4.3 Refining the dimensions of culture

Sociological writers on culture have between them identified over a hundred different dimensions of culture. Furthermore, cultural analysis of cross‐country differences in industrial policy has identified other dimensions besides those mentioned above [Foreman‐Peck and Federico (1991)]. Almost all of these additional dimensions can however be subsumed under the four key dimensions: indeed, these key dimensions were developed in part as composite dimensions under which various other dimensions could be subsumed. Table 4 (Pg. 379, HOTEOAAC) lists 22 dimensions of culture, including many of the most frequently cited dimensions, and attributes each of them to one of the four key categories.

Where issues relating to political constitutions and national economic policy are concerned, the sub‐dimensions associated with the first dimension – individualism versus collectivism – are most important. Where issues of organizational structure and management style are concerned, the sub‐dimensions associated with pragmatism versus proceduralism are most important. The quality of personal relationships within organizations, the intensity of competition between organizations, and the general quality of social life are governed by the sub‐ divisions of the third dimension – the degree of trust. The extent to which people are energized and inspired by visions of better lifee, either for themselves or others, is

60 governed the sub‐divisions of the fourth dimension – the degree of tension. Since there is insufficient space to examine these sub‐dimensions in detail, their principal features are summarized in Tables 5‐8 (Pg. 381‐89, HOTEOAAC). The middle columns of these tables explain the nature of the variation along the dimension concerned, whilst the right‐hand column considers the point along the spectrum on which the best results are likely to be obtained. This is described as the ‘high performance mix’. It is important when studying culture to remember that the dimensions of cultural variation do not normally run from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ or vice versa but, like ordinary economic variables, express a trade‐off in which the optimum is usually at an interior point. Just as in conventional economics, extremes rarely efficient in cultural life.

An optimum in this context represents a cultural mix which is likely to prove efficient in the long run. In modern parlance, it is ‘sustainable’. However, the optimum along any one dimension cannot be determined without reference to the other dimensions of culture. Thus a culture that promotes a distrustful attitude to other people may have an optimal degree of competitiveness which is quite high, whilst a culture which encourages people to trust each other may have an optimal degree of competitiveness which is much lower. In the long run there will be a tendency for competition between cultures to select the culture that is most efficient in overall terms.

Management and Drucker, Briefly

What does management do? According to Drucker, management is concerned with productivity and effectiveness. Management creates or identifies the consumer and consumer satisfaction. Management evaluates the results. Proper management in the business sector produces social stability through economic prosperity. And so on. Good management is good for society, Drucker contends, and the principles and applications of good management can and must be taught and learned by people dedicated to the good of society, in all its sectors (government, business and social). One could argue that the preponderance of Drucker’s written work was done to this end, to codify the practice of management as a discipline.

Is Drucker correct? Is good management good for society? Further, are those who would now promote Drucker’s work as the foundation for management as a liberal art correct? Should management be included in the Humanities curricula?

Considering Drucker’s Interests in Japan an Japanese Art

Peter Drucker self‐identified as a “social ecologist,” and as a “conservative, Christian anarchist.” For a social ecologist, one would think that Japan would provide fascinating subject matter. One could also see how Japan, with its economic

61 successes and history of feudal drama might appeal to a conservative. Drucker’s tentative, possibly deferential, foray into defining Shinto in “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” which he links to the existentialism admired by Peter for its merit as a vehicle for self‐realization (ref. Kierkegaard essay), is nonetheless surprising, considering Drucker’s religious affiliation. Animism, adapted to Confucianism, and other religions over centuries, including Christianity, does not seem compatible with Drucker’s independent spiritualism.

But anarchy? Drucker’s self‐determination as an anarchist seems to have even greater disconnect with the history of anarchy in Japan, which was imported from the West starting in the late 1880’s and possessed a trajectory more or less in tandem with evolving labor union movements in Japan, until the post‐Bellum era’s broader social rebellion reconfigured the anarchist as an agent for broader cultural change, influenced by Marxist principles, at which time the movement essentially died in Japan.

Anarchism does not factor into this Japan analysis as a determinate for Japan, because anarchy of the sort produced by the social despair of the West had not yet blossomed in post‐War Japan, up to the time Drucker wrote “A View of Japan through Japanese Art.” This may change, if the current global economic conditions worsen towards systemic breakdown.

As has been discussed, Drucker’s idea of anarchy may have been shaped by cases of libertarian resistance to governmental exercise of authority in limited populations. Drucker’s anarchy may have been also a coded nomenclature representing his retirement from polarizing partisanship in modern democratic affairs.

Japanese anarchy, if one could call it that, was a pantomime of Rock’n’Rollers at its most radical, a function of tectonic cultural shifts among classes and individuals left behind (or inspired) by Westernization. Drucker concludes that the mechanisms of cultural absorption and adaptation demonstrated during Japan’s historic integration of Chinese or Indian ways, or even Continental European technologies and concepts, that same digestive quality of Japanese response to outside influence, tempered by its internal essence, may not be up to the task of upgrading to the new injection.

We don’t know what Drucker might have thought of Murakami. An adept dimensionist, Murakami has established a production model rooted in ancient Japanese forms (Kano school), but conscious of new forms such as those generated by Fluxus and Andy Warhol for his Factory operations. While it is clear that Drucker was similarly comfortable with integrating old and new forms as an analyst, it is not clear that he was confident to comment on unfamiliar applications in the field of aesthetics.

As for anarchy, Japan cannot truly absorb the essence of anarchy, without dissembling, without abandoning its most treasured internal relationships. If Drucker somehow associated anarchy with “creative destruction,” which is a

62 romantic perspective probably definitive of many in the current crop of anti‐ globalist anarchists, judging from their protests, Drucker may have been capable of formulating intellectual compartmental protections that allow him to ignore the despair required of the Japanese, should they be compelled to abandon their relational ties for management purposes. Based on the study of Drucker’s work, particularly his prescription for the social sector in replacing the lost relations of Knowledge Workers, one does not see that Drucker would be inclined to defer in the instance of Japan’s cultural problem of relational adaptation. In fact, it seems clear that he attempts to inspire, in his way, Japan’s spirit for overcoming cultural intervention historically and direct it toward a response to globalist, economic and organizational colonialism.

On Critics on Critics on Critics (Epistemology and the Marxian)

From The Power of Images (Freedman, pg. 23‐4):

In the “Epistemo‐Critical Prologue” to his youthful The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin recommended an ascetic apprenticeship, whereby the philosophical explorer eschews both the inductive and the deductive approach and immerses himself in the most minute details of subject matter: “The relationship between the minute precision of the work and the proportions of the sculptural or intellectual whole demonstrates that truth content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of the subject matter.” This was the only way to save the phenomena, Benjamin platonically insisted. Thus he directed himself to a vigorous attack on induction: “The attempt to define ideas inductively – according to their range – on the basis of popular linguistic usage, in order then to proceed to the investigation of essence can lead nowhere.” The attack on induction led him to single out R. M. Meyer for criticism:

Thus the inductive method of aesthetic investigation reveals its customary murky colouring here too, for the view in question is not the view of the object resolved in the idea, but that of the subjective states of the recipient project into the work; that is what the empathy which R. M. Meyer regards as the keystone of his method amounts to. This method, which is the opposite of the one to be used in the course of the current investigation, “sees the art‐form of the drama, the forms of tragedy or comedy or character of situation, as given facts with which it has to reckon. And its aim is to abstract by means of a comparison of the outstanding representatives of each genre, rules and laws with which to judge the individual product. And by means of the comparison of the genres it seeks to discover general principles which apply to every work of art.”

Now, this is very astringent, and much of it may seem to apply to the present endeavour. But let it not be thought that this is an “aesthetic investigation.” Let no one think that I will seek general principles to apply to every work of art (nor even to “art” in general). I will certainly not seek to abstract genres, however pressing the issue of genre and conventional form may or may not turn out to be. Nevertheless, the process of investigation will indeed be inductive. While I am concerned with fragments and proceed by minutely examining them, as Benjamin recommended, I view the whole of human relations with figured imagery in order to out certain aspects of behavior and response that may usefully be seen to be universally and transculturally markable.

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There are, of course, plenty of other places where the inductive method laid to waste. But Benjamin’s argument is especially interesting because it is avowedly concerned with the relations between science and art in the analysis of art…

On Perception, Induction, Deduction and Conception

Perception is inductive (or is induction, they are close to identical, if not the same).

Perception leads to conception.

Deduction leads to conception.

Perception leads to deduction.

The relationship of perception (or induction) to deduction to conception is dimensional.

Regulation 6

Art critics must not be hired to curate exhibits.

Regulation 7

Art instructors must not be hired to critique students. The task of the art instructor is to demonstrate technique, or otherwise inspire his students to improve their skills as artists.

Considering Drucker’s Applied and Comparative Aesthetics

The “complete control of brush, ink and composition” Drucker celebrates in Japanese art, the “most carefully controlled and balanced composition and sophisticated handling of the brush,” the “ingenious calligraphy,” cannot withstand the anarchy of Jackson Pollack, or the artistic freedom he epitomizes. Pollack’s was the ferocious artistic embodiment of the genus homo indomitus Americanus who managed to defeat the Japanese warrior of World War 2 in combat. These are similar phenomena.

64 What Pollack made clear, and Judd after Pollack, in relation to the post‐Bellum character of American individual type, was that superior technology, numbers, organizational strategy and tactics were no replacements for individual performance, especially with regards innovation. Translating such performance to mass production is problematic and an issue for elsewhere.

Japan has yet to generate an answer for Pollack’s free form anarchy, and may not be capable of doing so while it cleaves to a repressive cultural monopoly. Murakami and his Daruma illustrate this fact. Murakami’s answer – surface quality and material innovation and prowess in application and finish, fail to match the performance of Pollack, in its visceral intimacy and directness. Further the depth for imagination projection in Pollack today has yet to be matched by any, except the best of the emerging dimensionist painters, who can now employ a vast array of diverse techniques and technologies to create push‐pull effects. The best way to observe this is by studying how Pollack’s paintings (and Judd’s sculpture for that matter, although the comparison of effects in Judd’s case must be studied in terms of Judd’s insistence on framing his specific objects himself), resist framing of any kind.

Pollack’s paintings outperformed the “ten minute and eighty years” of the Zen painters Drucker cites by every comparative measure, although Peter diverts the comparison to portraiture to save his argument.

This is not to say that on their own terms the Zen paintings are comparative. As described above, they are not art. They are spiritual proofs utilizing artistic means. As such, they are worthy of all due respect.

Perhaps Pollack ‐ a chain‐smoking mad cheating drunkard, emerging from some no‐ place in the American West, who bombed unstretched canvasses with house paint, wielding cheap brushes or sticks, splattering the floor of a rural barn ‐ was too anarchic for Drucker, or too free. Pollack did not seemingly prove any spiritual maxim, although the number of agents interested in managing his effects have gone to great lengths to explain Pollack, many in the pejorative, among them the Marxian critics and psychologists. They disapprove of heroism also, and masculinism of the macho brand Pollack demonstrated.

Perhaps the other romantic notion, of Japanese spiritual essence and discipline, rooted in repetition and tradition, a mortal and sentient sublimation beyond the collective to the spiritual, was more acceptable for Peter than Pollack’s alcoholic nihilism. Certainly, Pollack did not wear the robes of a Zen monk, nor did he appear to be interested in such exotic pursuits. He wore denim.

Pollack was also an early iteration of the contemporary art star, one of America’s first, thanks to LIFE Magazine, the camera (moving and still), Clement Greenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, MoMA and the US Government. Pollack did not seem averse to interviews or any of the other details or expectations of art stardom, though he hardly can be said to have risen to the role model role advocated for

65 leaders by Drucker. Pissing in the wealthy patron’s fireplace is not proper leadership behavior in the Drucker model. Neither is perishing scandalously and in high American style – Pollack driving himself to death behind the wheel of a huge American car and taking one and a half pretty young girls with him, three sheets to the wind. Romanticizing Pollack’s pugilistic confrontational pose in the famous “Irascibles” photo aside, his distasteful or diseased posturing and activities do however – to use the literary form of Kerouac, another similar type of American – not crash Pollack’s insane driven volcanic COMPLETE reordering of the previous status quo art. Pollack’s un‐brand and un‐school was beyond Drucker’s measure. Pollack’s proto‐frenzies obliterated Zen at the same time they obliterated European Classical, court and academic styles. Drucker apparently preferred the stoic solitude of Zen nothingness and enlightenment to Pollack’s American beat Rock’n’Roll (before it was Rock) heroism.

Peter Drucker was dead wrong not to point his powerful dimensional analytic apparatus at Pollack, instead of the Japanese. Drucker’s failure to surmount his native or acculturated prejudices ‐ as they are exposed in Drucker’s choice of aesthetic subject matter ‐ is the failure of the immigrant to assimilate to his new homeland’s culture. As a direct result, we have been deprived of a Druckerian analysis of one of the most important socio‐ecological transformations in the history of Western civilization: the migration of the world’s art center from Paris to New York in the aftermath of World War 2, and the subsequent huge economic expansion of the global arts industry.

Of the failures of discernment in this essay, this is of course the most glaring. Others are not a function of omission as much as they are failures to prognosticate. Drucker did not, it would seem, envision the day less than a decade after the completion of “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” when Japanese insurance magnate Yasuo Goto paid the equivalent of nearly $40,000,000 for van Gogh’s “Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers.”

Nor, as mentioned elsewhere, did Drucker envision the cartoon happy‐faced flower heads of Murakami, and their worldwide success among the contemporary art world’s global elites. Without Pollack there is no Murakami. No one is talking about the Sanso collection.

From The Visual Arts As Human Experience (Weismann, pg. 121):

For, as we know, nothing can be out of proportion or wrong except in comparison to something which is in proportion, and hence correct.

Geometry and Proportion in Western Art

66

From The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry (Haimbridge, Introduction):

The basic principles underlying the greatest art so far produced the world may be found in the proportions of the human figure and in the growing plant. These principles have been reduced to working use and being employed by a large number of leading artists, designers, and teachers of design and manual art.

The principles of design to be found in the architecture of man and of plants have been given the name “Dynamic Symmetry.” This symmetry is identical with that used by Greek masters in almost all the art produced during the great classical period.

The synthetic use of these design principles is simple. The Greeks probably used a string held in two hands…

To recover these themes of classic design it is necessary to use arithmetical analysis. Geometrical analysis is misleading and inexact. Necessity compelled the old artists to use simple and understandable shapes to correlate the elements of the design fabrics. It is evident that even the simplest pattern arrangements can become very complicated as a design develops. A few lines, simples as a synthetic evolution, may tax the utmost ingenuity to analyze.

Obviously, Peter Drucker’s characterization of Western art as geometric is incorrect.

ON DESIGN

Defining Design (For Drucker)

Design is the managing of elements in a composition for effect.

Drucker’s Critical Flaw

Peter Drucker in his comparative analyses in “A View of Japan through Japanese Art” produces incorrect conclusions primarily because he confuses design with art. This is also true of his writing in general. Management is a design‐oriented discipline. It is not a liberal art, or any other kind of art.

67

A New Definition of Management

Management is the design of organizations.

A New Definition of Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker was a designer of Management (the design of organizations).

On Design and Art

Art involves design. Design does not necessarily involve art, since it is concerned with effect. Art is concerned with function: perceptual, conceptual, and dimensional.

Both art and design require skill in execution.

Both art and design have functions in the collective.

Art begins with induction. Design concludes with deduction.

Both art and design must be considered in the analysis of Dimensional Realism.

More on Daruma and Drucker, China, Proportion and Geometry and the Atom Bomb, Japan and Design, Plus Patterns and Moving on to Shepard Fairey (OBEY)

Drucker’s misrepresented Daruma, who is known also by other names in other languages (Dámó, Dharma). The misrepresentation was topological, relative to Daruma’s proportional significance in Japan’s (and China’s, etc., Asian) social ecology.

Zen and Japanese redesigned Daruma to better fit, one of the social effects or manifestations of Bodhidharma, Ch’an, into militaristic Japan’s societal composition, as Zen.

How cultural meaning was lost in Drucker’s analysis, which has broader application to the two cultures’ distinguishing fundamental characteristics, is demonstrable in a dimensional comparison of Japan and China’s respective transformations in the decades between 1980 and now. The narrative of this comparison is waveform

68 (ongoing), and therefore indicates many such instances of divergence or evidence of disparate design, over centuries in this case.

To place Daruma in the Japan’s social topology is a function of time and the number of other proportionally relative elements. This is also true of “Daruma (by whichever name)” in China, or even the United States.

For example, Buddhism in general, and Daruma specifically, exist in the composition of American social topology, only after being introduced here through exchanges with the East, such as the exhibition for which Drucker composed his essay.

Defining Social Topology

Social Topology is the composition of cultural effects in a society.

Defining Individual Topology

Individual Topology is the composition of cultural effects in an individual’s perceptual infrastructure.

Comparing Social Topological Designs

Comparing social topological design methods is possible. Caution must be used in selecting the criteria. Poor selection leads to disproportionate results.

For instance, compare how Japan sampled China’s Daruma, and how China sampled Warhol’s Mao. This is a difficult comparison

The comparison of social topologies at a given point in time is a form of dimensional analysis (woven form).

The comparison of social topologies over time is a form of dimensional analysis (waveform).

The Analytic Problem with Social and Individual Topologies

Individual topological analysis is a function of perspective. Individual topology affects deduction. Because of basic facts of dimensionality and point of view, failures

69 of individual to comprehend an object proportionally at any given time, relative to social topologies, is highly prone to perceptual failure. This is certainly not to say that the undertaking of individual topological analysis is not worthwhile. It is. However, to be effective, topological analyses by a number of individual must be combined to create a collective topological analysis, or one from multiple perspectives. Or an individual must shift points of view (POV), in rotational motion, vertical or horizontal motion, etc., in order to develop a multiplicity of perspectives of the subject of analysis. Again, the conclusions will be combined to form a more trustworthy analysis.

The topological analysis is scientific and dimensional. An example of effective application of the form is the use of many computers connected electronically to solve a problem.

At no point should Epistemological conclusion be permitted. Epistemological conclusions in the analysis of topologies will always be incorrect, and disproportionate.

At any time, scientific analysis of the resulting data is warranted, even if not conclusive. Dimensional analysis is practical.

Epistomological Conclusion is the second order of control on seeing. Epistemological conclusions ‐ especially in their consequent directive effects ‐ endanger our collective survival. A prime case is found in the failures of the US intelligence apparatus in the run‐up to the Iraq War. The agents of Epistemological conclusion were represented in the Bush Administration.

Understanding Japan’s Social Topology (Disney Case):

From “Disney Goes to Tokyo (Crossing the Pacific),” Managing for the Future, Organizational Behavior & Processes (Ancona, et al., pg. M10‐32):

The answer lies in the workings of culture itself, for culture is not only an integrating device, but a differentiating device as well, a way of marking boundaries. Tokyo Disneyland does so in a variety of ways. One already mentioned is the outdoing of Disneyland in the order‐ keeping domain. The message coming from Japan (for the Japanese) is simply “anything you can do, we can do as well (or better).” If one of the characteristic features of modern Japan is its drive toward perfection, it has built a Disneyland that surpasses its model in terms of courtesy, size, efficiency, cleanliness, and performance. Were the park built more specifically to Japanese tastes and cultural aesthetics, it would undercut any contrast to the original in this regard. While Disneyland is reproduced in considerable detail, it is never deferred to entirely, thus making the consumption of this cultural experience a way of marking the boundaries between Japan and the United States. Japan has taken in Disneyland only, it seems, to take it over.

70

Ch’an & Zen (Topological Comparison)

A proportional analysis of the social topologies of Japan and China is possible, using spiritual and artistic practices as points of departure.

On Ch’an

Enlightenment, through the Ch’an method, started with the rational discourse between the Master and students, progressed to the irrational discourse, then to the yell, then to the tossed mat or rice bowl, then the slap, then the stick. This process was documented carefully. The progressive movement of Ch’an is waveform. Ch’an is woven form, exhibiting both individual and collective expressive elements.

On Zen

Japan redesigned Ch’an in the shogunate manner, reformatting enlightenment into nothing (Void), except the social hierarchy, in the process. Why should it do otherwise, since Japan’s animistic root spirituality is self‐sufficient or ‐sustaining; collectively fluid and applicable; material‐based and site‐specific?

On Chinese Painting (ante­European)

To understand Chinese painting, one must read The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, compiled by Wang Gai (1645–1707), Wang Shi (1649–1734), and Wang Nie (fl. late 17th–early 18th century).

From AskAsia.org:

The Jiezi yuan hua zhuan (Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting), issued in three series, was undoubtedly inspired by the earlier Shizhu zhai shuhua pu (The Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Calligraphy and Painting) printed by Hu Zhengyan (1584–1674), but it was specifically designed as a pedagogical tool for aspiring painters, with a substantial amount of introductory text devoted to the basic principles of Chinese painting and subsequent sections that break down the elements of landscape painting so that figures, boats, trees, and rocks can be copied separately and mastered before the apprentice painter attempts to incorporate these elements into his own composition.

This second series of The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting has eight juan dealing with the subjects of orchids, bamboo, prunus, and chrysanthemums, greatly augmenting the

71 original five juan of 1679, which were limited to landscapes. The second series was enormously popular by virtue of its classical subject matter and superb visual quality. It continued to be printed from the old woodblocks in Nanjing by the same Wang family for at least a century; editions from 1782 and 1800 are known to exist.

Copyright Holder: National Library of China

It is the definitive manual culminating hundreds of years of artistic evolution. It is one of the greatest technical painting texts in history. There is nothing comparable in Japanese social topology, except the technical protocols of Samurai swordmaking, which have not been documented textually similarly, as a cultural expression.

Zen and Japanese Painting

Bushido is the lens through which Japan perceived Chinese painting and spirituality. The social topology of Japan was brutally controlled by the shogunate and the various warlords of its history. Neither Chinese painting nor Chinese spirituality was permitted to eclipse the power of Japanese rulers in the social topology. However, both were redesigned and reformatted to be optimized, and to work within the framework of pre‐existing Japanese cultural and spiritual topologies.

On a Significant Element in the Topology of Chinese Spirituality

From Art and Civilization (Myers, pg. 102):

Lao Tzu (meaning “old philosopher”), author of The Canon of Reason and Virtue (ca. fifth century ? B.C.), advocated an even greater confidence in mankind and its inherent virtue. Whereas Confucius relied on education, paternalistic example, and intellectual attainments, Lao‐tzu felt it would be better to let people alone and they would be good by themselves. This implied that each person should live in the way that was most natural for him. The Tao, or “Way,” that this teacher tried to communicate, the ordered system of the universe, the course of nature, meant getting as close to nature as possible, living a simple humble life, and even withdrawing from the world in order to find oneself. Although Taoism was ultimately overlaid with various magical and superstitious practices involving exorcism of evil spirits and malignant forces, it was vastly influential in the evolution of a significant Chinese nature philosophy and the nature poetry and painting have stemmed from it.

On the Social Topology of Chinese Revolutionary Culture Relative to the Social Topology of Japan

To read Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, with its admonition of unethical, ineffective and destructive behavior by rulers and social elites, is to understand the underpinnings in the topology of Chinese revolutionary culture.

72

Peter Drucker should have loved Lao Tzu:

• “Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.” • “He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.” • “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” • “The words of truth are always paradoxical.” • “Great acts are made up of small deeds.” • “Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” • “One who is too insistent on his own views finds few to agree with him.” • “To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.”

The primary distinction between the China‐Japan and Japan‐America acculturations can be encapsulated in two words: “Fat Man.” It’s an ugly truth. Murakami confronts Japan’s atomic reality in his blobby, cartoonish style, but one must assume that, for the Japanese the image still resonates topologically, as the narrative does not diminish, but proceeds in the waveform pattern. For Japan, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the United States is best understood in terms of the perceptual woven form, within the context of Japanese social topology. For the Japanese, this event represents the first case of complete systemic failure for its social framework, its first total defeat, in the vernacular of war, and will forever be a milestone in the evolution of Japanese cultural progression.

In a catalog essay friendly to the subject, it would have probably been considered terribly insensitive of Drucker, from the Japanese perspective, to raise the issue of the atom‐bombing in the context of social topology. Cultural sensitivity is a new Epistemological or coded indicator for violating establishment maxims. In the Japanese social topology, similar approbation would be directed toward the suggestion that the Japanese are traditionally, as expressed in their social topology, arrogant, racist or bloodthirsty with ambitions of conquest through violent means. Whether these assertions are true or not is in one way irrelevant.

Assimilation or acculturation, for the Japanese, until the atom‐bombing, was a very successful facet of tactical and strategic warfare. In the Japanese social topology, as expressed in government, business and society, effectively managed acculturation dimensionally, forming a unified front led by the shogunate. The mushroom cloud and the Marines just over the horizon obliterated the traditional disposition of that defining Japanese feature in one blinding, rending, hellish blast.

73 The great bomb was only a final act in World War 2, of a cultural exchange progression, taking decades to unfold, between the democratic United States and the Imperial Japan. Shortly before the bombs were dropped events in the Pacific Theater predicted the topological shift in graphic terms.

I am thinking of the scenes of social massacre and mass suicide, like those carried out on Iwo Jima and on Okinawa, managed by Japanese soldiers, involving civilians when they were present, as defeat of the Japanese by Marines became imminent.

Propaganda promoted the perception that the gaijin invaders would torture men and rape women who surrendered. The propaganda was effective. Japanese soldiers blew themselves up with grenades rather than be captured, pilots flew their planes into ships in suicide attacks, and women threw their infants and themselves off cliffs into the ocean. This was 20th Century Bushido.

On Government and Art

Propaganda is collective. It serves to promote the activities or Epistemology of government, religion, business or any organization.

Propaganda predates America by a century. It was invented by the Catholic Church for the purposes of missionary work in colonies [Sacra Congregātiō dē Prōpagandā Fidē, Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith (established 1622)].

The American principle of free speech is in direct contradiction to Propaganda.

In a representative democracy ‐ founded on the principle of free speech – propaganda (as a function of social topology) is contradictory or mutually exclusive, at least in principle. Structurally, the government is supposed to enact the will of the people. Therefore, propaganda should not be necessary.

Propaganda shapes, drives or even determines the will of the people. Propaganda is harmful in free speech democracy for that reason. Its function is to undermine the free thought of citizens by all available means, including all forms of cultural concourse, including art.

On Epistemology, Propaganda and Art

All propaganda is Epistemological. Propaganda is not art.

74 On Epistemological Religion and Art

Many religions are Epistemological. Epistemological art is propaganda. Epistemological religious propaganda is not art.

On American Democratic Art

Art is free speech in American democracy. The enemies of free speech oppose art. By extension, they oppose American democracy.

On American Democratic Art and Ownership

Free speech by definition cannot be owned. It belongs in the Commons.

On Epistemology and Obscenity

“Obscenity” is the third order of Epistemological control over seeing. The determination of obscenity is harmful to the democracy, to free speech and to art. As such, it undermines and endangers the democratic collective’s survival.

In the American democracy, therefore, art should not be owned by individuals or by organizations, commercial or social. Art in the democracy must be held in trust in the Commons, which is the government. There must be no regulation of access to art by the government.

Given the separation of Church and State, there is no Epistemological basis to countermand this principle sufficient to supersede the guarantee of free speech in the Commons.

It is must be a primary function of democratic government to care for and provide access to art for its citizenry. This function is not less important than protecting the citizenry in times of war.

On “Schools” and Art (Axioms)

Epistemological schools are descendents of the Roman Catholic College of Propaganda.

75 Beyond that, the Epistemological model originates in Western civilization with the Greeks (such as the Peripatetics of Aristotle, or the Platonic Academy).

The general form is common throughout human history and across cultures, wherever the few control the many.

The Kano school in Japan is an analog, but also unique in that the Kano school also functioned as a studio collective and professional organization.

The Pre­American Art School

Fine art instruction in Europe is a long and prestigious tradition. It began in the Middle Ages when master painters passed on their artistic legacies to their apprentices. In 1648 a group of young artists broke away from the old establishment, which grouped them together with artisans, formed a union, and established in Paris the first French fine arts institution. Considered revolutionary for its time, the new school was modeled after existing Italian institutions and named the Acadèmie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.

The school's main goals were to provide free instruction and promote equality among the students. In this democratic spirit, instruction was free, making it possible for students from all social backgrounds to attend. A wide array of qualifying contests promoted social equality, allowing students to advance on merit alone. The earliest incarnation of the Ecole des Beaux‐Arts was born.

More on the Kano school (Why it is not Epistemological)

From the Metropolitan Museum website:

The Kano school was the longest lived and most influential school of painting in Japanese history; its more than 300‐year prominence is unique in world art history. Working from the fifteenth century into modern times, this hereditary assemblage of professional, secular painters succeeded in attracting numerous patrons from most affluent social classes by developing, mastering, and promoting a broad range of painting styles, pictorial themes, and formats.

Kano Masanobu (1434–1530) is credited with establishing the Kano school as a professional atelier in Kyoto. Although not himself a Zen adherent, Masanobu was closely associated with influential Zen temples and adopted the Chinese painting style that they favored. Imported along with Zen philosophy and practice, Chinese‐style painting was characterized by a strong emphasis on brushwork, predominance of ink with little or no use of pigments, and preference for Chinese subjects, especially images of Zen patriarchs and landscapes. Taking advantage of the close relationship between the Zen monks and the Ashikaga shoguns, who looked to the temples for cultural and religious advice, Masanobu and his followers secured and maintained the highly lucrative favor of the military rulers of the day.

By expanding the repertoire of the Kano artists to include boldly rendered brushwork and bright colors, Masanobu's son Kano Motonobu (1476–1559) widened the school's appeal

76 and devised a style that merged the ink and brushwork emphasized in Chinese paintings with the decorativeness, color, and pattern associated with native Japanese interests. Building on these innovations and versatility, Motonobu's grandson Kano Eitoku (1543– 1590) introduced a new strength and dynamism to his large compositions that appealed to the warlords who dominated the Momoyama period and suited the grand interiors of their massive and impressive castles. His series of sliding doors (fusuma) and folding screens (byobu) painted with oversize animals, figures, and nature scenes set against scintillating gold foil well illustrated the power and energy the daimyo patrons wished to express. Kano Sanraku (1559–1635), one of Eitoku's adopted sons, in his turn added a greater sense of elegance and decorativeness to Eitoku's style, capturing current interest in sophistication and sumptuousness.

Throughout the centuries, the Kano school consisted of numerous studios where groups of well trained and skillful craftsmen worked together to serve clients from almost all wealthy classes, including the samurai, aristocracy, Buddhist clergy, Shinto shrines, and the increasingly affluent merchants. While they kept their production secrets closely guarded, in part relying on family ties, apprenticeships, and copybooks, the popularity and prominence of the Kano school led to the establishment of offshoots in many cities. The Kano school style was transmitted even more widely by artists who were trained by Kano painters but not officially connected with family studios, and by rival artists imitating their style to suit patrons' demands.

In 1600, the main branch of the Kano school moved from Kyoto to the new capital of Edo, following their principle patrons, the Tokugawa shogunate. The most successful member of the Kano school in the Edo period was Kano Tan'yu (1602–1674), who was named the shogun's painter‐in‐residence at the age of fifteen and was commissioned to decorate many of the most important castles of the day. Consistent with the Tokugawa's emphasis on social control, Tan'yu created a style that was more restrained than the grandeur popular during the preceding Momoyama era, incorporating a renewed interest on ink monochrome. An astute connoisseur, Tan'yu enjoyed access to the most important art collections of the day— a privilege that had benefited the work of his predecessors—and produced a number of insightful annotated notebooks on antiquities.

While the Kano school's close association with the Tokugawa shogunate guaranteed their prosperity throughout the Edo period, their prominence declined when the fortunes of their patrons waned. During the end of the nineteenth century, the Kano school functioned as a conservative assembly of painters who were increasingly overshadowed by other artists.

The best way to learn art is one‐on‐one instruction, master to student/apprentice/assistant.

Epistemological schools are organizations for collective indoctrination. They have no place in the democracy.

Technical schools are organizations for the teaching of skills.

Technical art schools for dimensional realism would teach the crafts of painting, sculpture and drawing. All instruction would be one‐on‐one. Since dimensional realism is a democratic form, all instruction would be free.

77 Perceptual schools would train students to see, but since human beings don’t need training to see, perceptual schools are not necessary. A museum is an analog for a perceptual school.

Conceptual schools would train students in deduction and the formulation of ideas into invention, across disciplines. They could also be called Schools of Innovation and Invention.

Management schools should be abolished, because they have no place in the democracy, except in the military or government. Management for the mobilization of people in times of war or natural catastrophe is absolutely vital.

Its analog is officer’s training school.

The Dimensionist Art School

I have proposed the 4D art school and written about it extensively elsewhere. It is essentially a multi‐use facility. The basic elements are these:

• Three galleries o Exhibition hall o Projection hall o Project space • Instruction and working studio o Painting o Drawing o Sculpture • Office • Library • Social area (café) • Performance Space • Pre‐ and post‐production studio(s) • Recording studio • Storage area • Shop o Wood o Metal

ON REDESIGNING SOCIAL TOPOLOGIES

From the HOTEOAAC (pg. 511):

The third characteristic of creative individuals is the acquisition of cognitive skills, such as the capacity for divergent thinking, i.e. thinking ‘beyond the square’, where the exercise of the imagination leads to multiple possible solutions to the problem. This has proved to be a

78 fruitful area for empirical research, and tests for divergent thinking have been devised which have been widely used in creativity research and in practical applications, for example, as indicators of potential for creative thought in areas such as management [Runco (1999b)].

Turning to creativity as a process, we note that the representation of creativity in this context has generally dissected the process into a series of stages [Gilhooly (1988); Lubart (2001)]. Typically the stages as described involve preparation or observation, followed by definition of the problem, perhaps a stage of ‘incubation’, and then illumination leading to a solution. A final stage may also be identified involving verification. Whilst the characterization of the creative process as one of rational decision‐making according to a logical procedure has much appeal, it seems to imply that anyone could become creative simply by following the required steps. In fact, it may well be that creativity, especially in art, is the very antithesis of a rational process. Indeed revolutionary movements in art such as dada have been explicitly aimed at subversion of the established order.

Epistemological control of seeing can and often does occur in reverse. It is commonly referred to as “revisionist history.” In “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” Drucker ignores censorship and the redesign of history in the Japanese social topology.

On Identity and Social Topology

Identity is a woven form that occurs in a topology. This is true for the individual and the collective.

On Identity and the Dimensional

Identity is perceptual and conceptual and dimensional.

Identity draws from the past, exists in ‘real time’ and ‘real space,’ and projects into the future. These are the individual manifestations of identity. The collective manifestation of identity is the viewer, or witness. The collective is the 4D element of identity.

The analogs for identity in art are, in order, drawing, sculpture and painting.

The analog for the witness of identity for the collective is History.

The rewriting of textbook accounts of the civilian suicides on Okinawa is a modern example of identity management. Alternative interpretations or versions of events

79 contained in the context of “objective” documentation of actual events are the fourth order of Epistemological control on seeing. The control of news or media is therefore essential to the management of popular or collective response to past and present events or realities.

Points of exchange are crucial in social topologies. Identity is shaped, driven or determined at points of exchange, or transmission points.

In the case of World War 2 atrocities carried out under the auspices of Japanese force, the redesign of perception is being undertaken by conservative Japanese historians. These historians are also redesigning other histories that nationalists would prefer disappear, such as the massacre of Chinese civilians under Japanese occupation in Nanking. The Chinese remember Nanking differently than do those Japanese historians.

This sort of thing is a regular feature in Japanese culture, but certainly is not restricted to the Japanese. It is a common feature of oppressive societies. As this text is being written, some officials in the US government are attempting strenuously to prevent the release of accounts of torture perpetrated by US forces on alleged terrorists. Any society can become socially oppressive by subverting the principles of free speech.

Managing identity is often indicated by gender definitions in the collective. In “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” Drucker engages in gross distortion in his descriptions of the roles women have played historically in the Japanese social topology.

Despite some pre‐War Westernization, it took the American occupation to provide Japanese females with the freedom to participate and be represented in the nation’s government. The normative culture of Japan, and this sheds light on the less‐ romantic side of Confucianism, treated women as bedeviled chattel for hundreds of years, essentially a slave class.

This is why Japanese art produced no Venus de Milo, Drucker’s anecdotes about mothers‐in‐law notwithstanding. It is no less enlightening to note that as recently as 2005 legislation was promulgated in Japan to radically diminish the equality of women in Japanese social and professional society.

Finally, in “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” Drucker fails to acknowledge the insular nature of Japanese social topology, which is reflected in the country’s demographic of racial homogeneity. Homogeneity in a social topology deeply affects the ability of the collective to innovate.

80 The principle of social equality is inextricable from social identity. In Japan’s case, the behavior of the society is a function of identity and projected need. Management of history is necessary to prevent perceptual damage to the collective identity. In Japan’s case, we have the Ainu ethnocide. In the case of America, we have the ethnocide (and in some instances, genocide) of the indigenous peoples.

Clearly, the cases of Japan’s and America’s collective disregard for the equality and self‐determination of the Ainu and the indigenous peoples of North America, respectively, point to a facet of the countries social topologies that permits them to project their needs (a function of identity) into the landscape of others’. Such incursions are endemic throughout history. China‐Tibet, European colonialism, Roman imperialism, and on and on – we can see a preponderance of evidence that the shaping of one collective’s identity can happen at the expense of another’s.

Is there no other way?

The answer lies in the American democracy, and how we ultimately deal with the problem of private ownership (of land). Every aspect of the discussion thus far must be applied to the problem, if a successful outcome is to occur in the future.

Hope

The election of President Obama suggests the possibility of a good result. How?

The social topology of Japan provides a clue. The pervasive exclusion of foreigners from the substantive internal functions of Japanese social concourse is as effective today as it has ever been. Japan is no democratic melting pot. The influence of the outside on the inside is not a facet of tension or polarities, it is a highly controlled mediation designed to perpetuate the ruling social order and established collective identity. As Peter Drucker points out (mistakenly, the reader may recall), when embarking on his mischaracterization, or historical redesign of Daruma, the qualities of “spirituality, power, total compelling control,” are what is essential to the Japanese animus.

Old habits die hard, but die they must. Art is a vehicle for reshaping collective identity, which is, in a word, innovation. Dimensionist realism entails that a fundamental aspect of art is historical accuracy. Correct documentation is vital to the integrity of expression, because expressive progressions occur scientifically. Failures are normal. They must be remedied, if possible, or another avenue of inquiry must be sought, if the failure is terminal.

The solution for private ownership (of land, things or people) is, as we have seen, the trust, or stewardship of the Commons. The presumption is equality. (“All men are created equal.”) President Obama, a descendant of slave owners, married to a

81 descendent of slaves – privately owned people – indicates that the identity of the United States, its collective topology, allows for the society to correct past failures. The medium for such change is love, as is usually the case.

What if America, tomorrow, determined to restore the Black Hills to the Trust of the Lakota, as a function of the collective will?

This course of action is the only one that will stave off the emerging threat of globalism and the rise to pre‐eminence of the multinational corporation, and the concomitant outcome of the subsuming of national identity into a global collective.

Globalist corporate ownership – of property, the means of production and the shaping of identity – is the greatest threat to art.

The most effective preventative mechanism for preserving individual and collective identity from globalist corporate ownership is education in the principles and applications of democratic dimensionist realism. These are:

• Science • Mathematics • The Arts (Humanities) o Perceptual o Conceptual o Dimensional o Technical • Representative, Constitutional Democracy • History (Identity) • Social Topology o Individual o Collective

Individual and collective identity derives in democratic dimensionist realism from the principle of freedom.

Democratic dimensionist realism in its educational form equals the instruction of the art and science, technique and history, social topology of individual freedom.

A roughly identical assessment of the Japanese educational method might be levied, thus: “education, power, total compelling control.” The stringent controls on curriculum, and the directional, cutthroat nature of academic success in Japan are

82 indicators that should explain why conceptual facility is impeded by the social ecology or infrastructure.

Education and Social Topology: A Review of Choices

Prior to American occupation, and the attendant commencement of social transfiguration of Japan by the principles of equality and free speech, nearly any function of the society could be judged as Peter Drucker judged a favorite Japanese painting and artist: “______(fill in the blank), power, total compelling control.” Power and control define the Japanese social topology. Japan’s emblem was the Samurai sword. Its spirit was Bushido.

Equality in Japan pre‐Bellum might be sited (in the point of exchange) in the rare social concourse of two identically ranked people of the same gender. Free speech could hardly have existed at all.

Without equality and free speech, art does not exist.

The analogs for choice in art are plenty, but the most representative is color.

To understand the impact on art, from the maintenance of a social topology absent equality and free speech, one can look to the usage of color in Japanese art. It should not be surprising that ink is the predominant artist medium throughout the history of Japan prior to its Westernization. When color is used, it is used in service to some other element in the composition. Compare this to Jackson Pollack’s use of color.

Does Environmental Threat Preclude Choice?

To be fair, Japan has always been threatened by powerful neighbors. Still, Japan is not a small country. It is larger and more populous than most European nations. Not all islands – whether the literal kind or the geographically, politically or economically figurative kind have the same proclivity for control and singularity. Hawaii, Scotland and Israel provide divergent models.

Resistance to aggression takes many forms. It is dimensional.

If anything about Japan is unique in the world, it is its consistency in designing staunch systems of racial and internal exclusion, while managing technological advancement. This proclivity cannot be explained away by any one element in the social topology. Japan’s resistance to aggression by maintaining rigid internal controls is dimensional.

83

ON VISION AND FUNCTION

From The Setts of the Scottish Tartans (Stewart, pg. 4):

…(A) sett stick was treasured in great houses as a visible standard for maintenance of the clan or family tartan. Surely, once it had been woven, a piece of the actual material would have served the same purpose more easily and effectively, in the unlikely event of the local weavers not being already familiar with the sett in all its details.

The colour‐strips that accompany the Notes on the individual tartans correspond to the warp as it appears on the loom before the actual weaving is begun. For each colour‐strip there is in the text a representative thread‐count, and this by itself is sufficient for the weaver wishing to produce a tartan, but the colour strips give an immediate visual indication of the character of the design, and make it easy to identify any given tartan.

From The Story of Art (Gombrich, pg. 104‐5):

Some of the great teachers of China appear to have had a similar view of the value of art to that held by Pope Gregory the Great. They thought of art as a means of reminding people of the great examples of virtue in the golden ages of the past. Once of the earliest illustrated Chinese book‐scrolls that have preserved is a collection of great examples of virtuous ladies, written in the spirit of Confucius. It is said to go back to the painter Ku K’’ai‐chi, who lived in the fourth century A.D. The illustration (Fig. 94) shows a husband unjustly accusing his wife, and it has all the dignity and grace we connect with Chinese art. It is as clear in its gestures and arrangement as one might expect from a picture which also aims at driving home a lesson. It shows, moreover, that the Chinese artist had mastered the difficult art of representing movement. There is nothing rigid in this early Chinese work, because the predilection for undulating lines imparts a sense of movement to the whole picture.

What motivation, other than guilt of conscience or domination by hatred, would drive an individual or collective to wipe out the memory of another? Art is a hedge against both guilt without accountability and unmitigated hate, in its requirements for preservation and conservation. A civilization is judged by the art it chooses to conserve and the art it chooses to obliterate.

In “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” Peter Drucker’s impression of the cultural dynamics of Japan is problematic, in his parsing of elements within the composition of Japanese social topology. It is not that Drucker parses. It is to what end.

84 The contradictions go unresolved, which – recalling Lao Tzu – might seem to indicate truth. However, lack of literary resolution can be used as a literary device to imply truth, where it is and where it is not. Hypothetical scenario is another device of literary projection. Let us imagine Daruma, the enlightened foreigner with no limbs, meditating on a Tokyo sidewalk.

What would be his fate? In a 1996 New York Times article (Kristof, “Outcast Status Worsens Pain of Japan’s Disabled”): “Japan lacks any law prohibiting discrimination against the handicapped, although advocates for the disabled are trying to change that;” And "The idea was that if you're born deformed, you should be concealed as much as possible;" "…that view still survives in some households."

Although the subsequent decade has produced some changes, Daruma would still likely experience tremendous prejudice in Japan, as a handicapped person.

The social topology of Japan, as we have noted, is infused with Bushido. The warrior way of Bushido has little tolerance for infirmity or weakness.

"The samurai of thirty years ago had behind him a thousand years of training in the law of honor, obedience, duty, and self‐sacrifice..... It was not needed to create or establish them. As a child he had but to be instructed, as indeed he was from his earliest years, in the etiquette of self‐immolation. The fine instinct of honor demanding it was in the very blood..." [1896, Feudal and Modern Japan (May)]

In his essay, Drucker asks, “Is it still possible for Japan to encapsulate and transmute into Japan‐ness the foreign, the non‐Japanese, culture, behavior, ethics, and even aesthetics?” It seems the answer is: Yes, selectively.

For instance, when the Germans introduced Japan to the concept of eugenics, the Japanese were topologically prepared to embrace it. In this instance Japan is indeed conceptual. The mutual consequences of this West‐East cultural exchange are not definitively calculable. What can be said about it is that in the aftermath, both countries embarked on campaigns of brutal conquest, and both conducted crimes against humanity, including forced eugenics on innocents. Both enthusiastically pursued programs of racial perfection through combined scientific, military, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, political and social means. Japan and Germany were monsters.

The general justification for modern eugenics is the same wherever it is used: the preservation of racial purity, the strengthening of the bloodlines and the perfection of the idealized traits that makes the nation powerful and great. To pretend that the phenomenon of eugenics is somehow new, however, is to ignore the long, and in many instances, horrifying, practice of biological selection conducted by humans on each other. Genocide and ethnocide is nothing new. The use of modern science to enhance or innovate the process is what’s new.

85 When the warriors of Israel practiced it, as chronicled in the Old Testament, genocide was painted (in shades of crimson) as a function of divine will. This is also true of European Christian holocausts. In another, much less known case, the English attempted to eradicate “that damnable sept of thieves,” the Mac Iains of Glencoe as a matter of civic improvement, if not explicit racial prejudice colored by colonial sensibilities and ancient subliminal malice. “Mi run mor nan gall:” the great hatred of the highlander by the lowlander, is how the Scots described it.

The orders read thus:

You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels the Macdonalds of Glenco, and put all to the sword under 70. You are to have special care, that the old fox and his sons do upon no account escape your hands; you are to secure all the avenues, that no man escape. This you are to put in execution at five a clock in the morning precisely, and by that time or very shortly after it, I’lle strive to be with you with a stronger party; if I do not come at five, you are not to tarry for me, but to fall on. This is by the King’s SPECIAL COMMAND for the good and safety of the country, that these miscreants may be cutt off, root and branch. See that this be put in execution without feud or favour, else you may be expected to be treated as not true to the King or government, nor a man fit to carry commission in the King’s service. Expecting that you will not fail in fulfilling hereby, as you love yourself. [February 1, 1692 (Paterson)]

The extirpation of this clan is chronicled in depth, making Glencoe the first instance in history of a governmental conspiracy, travelling through the channels of documented organizational management, to the bayonet‐point of military execution upon a tribal people. As is more often than not the case, as borne out in the waveform nature of history, this act of savagery perpetrated by a nation through the various institutional tools at its disposal, involving governmental and extra‐ governmental dynamics, failed to succeed. It is always hard to exterminate a race of people, and the consequences of attempting to do so ‐ whatever it is called in the currency of language, and by whatever means it is carried out – are unforeseeable and far‐reaching.

Today, the Israel‐Palestinian conflict is conflated in shades, as perception via electronic globalization has evolved into a dimensional construct. Virtually any issue is rendered in the tonal spectrum of critical response. The international media can and sometimes does provide of sphere of perspectives on any given issue or happening, especially via the web. Not all the world is wired, certainly. (In fact, reviewing data on global internet access is an excellent point of departure for nearly any dimensional investigation of the machinations of global management among the three sectors.)

The role of corporate media is to pounce on the latest episode of news cycle fodder in order to, at least to the degree that the subject is valuable or affects corporate interests, integrate the story into an overarching narrative. Noam Chomsky and Marshall McLuhan were pioneers in parsing data in the shifting tides of information inundation and manipulation, to reveal how perception is managed by global minorities wielding power over majority interests.

86

Genocide and ethnocide are as old as mankind. Today, after hundreds of years of practice, they are fields of management.

It is disquieting to compare the Peter Drucker of The End of Economic Man and the Peter Drucker of “A View of Japan through Japanese Art.” In the former, Drucker wrote resoundingly:

If the economic, social, and military consequences are serious, the metaphysical and ideological weakness of a system that bases itself on organization as a substitute for order and creed is fatal. Organization cannot be accepted as an end in itself. It cannot satisfy the masses; and it does not satisfy them in the totalitarian countries. They are always demanding more – a new substance of society. But the only thing which they can be given is more organization. Every six months a new social order, every six months a new social order, every one “final,” is announced with great pomp and circumstance; a new labor front, a new peasants’ corporation, a new ministry, a new final church settlement. Every time this new social order turns out to be nothing but a new organization, serving nobody but itself, organizing nothing but itself.

The disquiet arises from one’s recognizing that the Japanese art lauded by Drucker was produced by a society every bit as highly organized and totalitarian in action as the Nazi society against which Drucker so passionately railed. If Drucker is looking forward in The End of Economic Man at the makings of manmade catastrophe, in “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” he is looking backwards at the same makings and seeing only the makings. That the two cases never converge in the mind of Drucker is disturbing and bizarre to me.

This disconnect demonstrates a perceptual and conceptual flaw that pervades Drucker’s efforts to design society through management of organizations. It is fine to celebrate the relics of Japanese culture and claim to enjoy or appreciate them sui generis. It is fine to seek to understand the culture by undertaking a dimensional survey of its various components and calling the conclusions one draws social ecology. To fail to examine either in the cultural topology – in Japan’s case, the topology that will manifest as the monster that Japan would become in the Second World War – when the seminal work of one’s career is derived from just such an assessment is manifestly a crisis of meaning.

On Meaning and Value

In art, meaning and value are identical. They are mathematical in their applications.

When the Epistemological seer cannot control seeing, he seeks to manage meaning and value.

87

The root cause of Drucker’s failure to discern the connection between Japanese content and context, and their relativity to the Nazi phenomenon, is not perceptual. Obviously, as is demonstrable in his commentary, Peter Drucker was a capable seer. In fact, he was and is broadly celebrated as a visionary.

Drucker was also a marvelous conceptualist. He was very proud of his invention of terms like Knowledge Worker and applications like Management (if pride is indicated by one’s reminding others that one is the inventor of such terms and applications).

The root cause of Peter Drucker’s failure to assemble the components into a topology, a composition, is his selective use of dimensional analysis in service to a rigid Epistemology. It is a failure to follow through. Drucker insisted on reaching conclusions where there were none.

Peter Drucker’s individual topology is characterized by a vertical emphasis. For Drucker, the construct was fundamentally Christian, European, if not Austrian, and conservative. To suggest that he never could divorce his roots incorrectly infers a psychological profile of Drucker. My suggestion is that his topological profile provides clues as to why or how Drucker might fail to connect the dots. In the end it is not a question of why or how, it is a question of values and meaning, or to put it another way, the means and value.

IN CONCLUSION

Peter Drucker famously walked away from a John Maynard Keynes lecture having "suddenly realized that Keynes and all the brilliant economics students in the room were interested in the behavior of commodities while I was interested in the behavior of people." Unfortunately, the behavior of commodities is still linked in the property‐based world of corporate, artificial or Epistemological intelligence.

Elsewhere, in preparatory research and writings, in conversations with Joseph Maciariello, and review of salient material like the essays on Stahl and Kierkegaard, I have explored the individual topology of Peter Drucker. As a result I have developed tremendous compassion for the man. The conundrum Drucker faced was the same conundrum faced by all humanity of his era. Never, in the long arc of his career, did Peter Drucker stop seeking an answer for how to link values and meaning to the operations of people in collectives.

88 He failed to conclusively attain his mission, not for lack of resolution, but for lack of another twenty‐five years. It is my conjecture that had Drucker had the opportunity to view the perceptual, dimensional evolution now materializing into form, that he would have seen the opportunity to modify or correct his earlier assumptions and suppositions and reached very different prescriptions for the betterment of human organization.

I believe that he might have noted President George H.W. Bush’s speech about the “New World Order,” and noted Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s recent G20 speech on the “New World Order,” and used a new iteration of mathematics, the dimensional, to evaluate the connection in terms of value and means, as well as values and meaning. Drucker’s expressed growing concerns about a broad range of issues: climate change and multinational corporations, the growing income disparity between haves and have‐nots, and the valuation of CEOs, to name a few. Perhaps, Drucker would have added things up and connected Nazi organizational behavior to globalist behavior, and managed to generate a forecast of the inevitable.

He might have been able to predict the end of organizational man, and the onset of either dimensional man, or – God help us – globalist, superclass, Davos or Salzburg man.

Eugenic Nation: Blood, Sex and Marriage in the Japanese Empire

Jennifer Robertson Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Abstract

During the heady, nationalist decades (1880‐1945) of empire‐building, "blood" was invoked by Japanese ideologues not only as a metaphor for "shared heredity" or "shared ancestry," but also as the essential material of "race." As a symbol of and euphemism for racial and cultural essence, blood remains a symbolic code or organizing metaphor for profoundly significant, fundamental, and perduring assumptions about Japaneseness and otherness, both within and outside of Japan.

It was during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries that "blood" (chi, ketsu), equated in earlier periods with death and ritual pollution, gradually acquired a positive metaphorical meaning of "life force" and lineage. The specific field of science that took up this "positive" meaning of blood as its subject was eugenics and race science, and it fueled a discourse that permeated all aspects of everyday life in Japan by 1900. The public sphere shaped by the discourse of eugenics (selective breeding) and race science was premised on a future‐ oriented vision of a racially‐improved nation‐state, one peopled by taller, heavier, healthier, and fertile men and women whose anthropometrically ideal bodies would serve as the caryatids of the Japanese nation and empire alike. Through networks of modern institutions and industries, such as the army, schools, hygiene exhibitions, immigration training programs, the press, fashion, advertising, popular genealogies, and so forth, the Japanese people were encouraged to think very differently about their bodies; that is, to think of their bodies as plastic, in the sense of capable of being molded, and as adaptable, pliable, and

89 transformable through new scientific regimens of nutrition and calisthenics. These regimens would, it was argued along implicit (and sometimes explicit) Lamarckian lines, would amplify and augment the beneficial results of eugenics.

This paper contextualizes and discusses the debates about "blood" (pure or mixed) at the crux of the multifocal eugenics movement in early twentieth century Japan. Shifting interpretations of endogamy and exogamy are explored as are the gendered operations of blood in the context of nation‐ and empire‐building. Attention is also drawn to the importance and relevance of historically‐grounded research on ideologies of blood. Only by attending to continuously present historical patterns of social control and national identity formation can we begin to frame a critical discourse of bioethics relevant to Japan with comparative potential; a critical discourse that will make visible the euphemisms for, and the interventions of, "second‐wave" eugenics today.

This is the cliff’s edge upon which we are collectively now poised to leap, to put it in Kierkegaardian terms. I for one would have preferred to have Peter Drucker available for consultation.

The central issues of human survival are presently being framed in either‐or terms, the old paradigm. On the one hand, the connection of blood, or race, to land (presented in the context of the heinous mutations of World War 2 Japan or Germany), or, on the other hand, the New World Order, which solves such matters by obviating them organizationally.

The passage above from The End of Economic Man ominously maps the precursors in language and disposition Nazi Germany’s Final Solution. One can only wonder at what a Final Solution might be for The New World Order, in its latest iteration, unveiled in the midst of the current global economic crisis.

When I pine for Peter Drucker, wishing to add a few decades to his tenure, it is because I would prefer Drucker’s analysis to David Rothkopf’s.

From “The Rise of the Superclass,” a Salon review of Rothkopf's "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making:"

Not everyone Rothkopf writes about in "Superclass" is a Davos man, but despite his efforts to remain impartial toward "the global power elite" he describes, you can tell that the elect milieu of the WEF gives him a palpable thrill. The book opens with a scene of the author making his way through the town's frozen streets, recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant. Suddenly, he's greeted effusively by a bestselling inspirational writer with whom he has been trading e‐mail: Paulo Coelho, "an icon of the global literary scene"! (The literary scene? I don't think so, though Coelho certainly is a publishing phenomenon.)

Rothkopf's credible, if not especially original argument in "Superclass" is that over the past several decades a "global elite" has emerged whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments. They schmooze regularly at conferences like Davos, go to the same schools, serve together on corporate and

90 nonprofit boards, and above all do business with each other constantly ‐‐ to the point that they have become a kind of culture in themselves, a "class without a country," as Rothkopf puts it. Furthermore, these people are "the new leadership class for our era."

A former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and an officer in an assortment of "advisory" firms (including Kissinger Associates, run by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the consulting company Rothkopf himself founded, Garten Rothkopf), Rothkopf is an insider of sorts, well enough connected to sit in on meetings of power brokers without quite being one himself. He also writes Op‐Eds on international affairs for major newspapers and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, positions that require the display of some critical distance. "Superclass" isn't as condemnatory as Naomi Klein's anti‐globalization manifesto "No Logo," let alone the conspiracy theorizing of "The Iron Triangle," Dan Briody's exposé of the Carlyle Group, but it doesn't merely fawn over its subjects, either.

Rothkopf announces that he and his researchers have identified "just over 6,000" people who match his definition of the superclass ‐‐ that is, who have met complicated (and vaguely explained) metrics designed to determine "the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide." These include heads of state and religious and military leaders ‐‐ even the occasional pop star, like Bono ‐‐ but the core membership is businessmen: hedge fund managers, technology entrepreneurs and private equity investors.

I would have also liked to ask Peter Drucker what he made of Madonna, travelling to Africa, to adopt a new child. “What, Professor Drucker, does this mean? What is the value of that baby?” I would have many questions to ask of Peter Drucker, about GM, about the redistribution of wealth occurring via the US Treasury to offset the asset‐ free credit boom precipitated by the rise to power in America of Ronald Reagan, the proto‐conservative Christian de‐regulator, privatizer, anti‐Communist, anti‐ Socialist, anti‐union, etc. I would want to know what books Peter Drucker opted not to write during his real lifetime, and what books he would publish in his dimensional lifetime.

Like many of the 20th Century’s great historical figures, Peter Drucker lived on the cusp in man’s perceptual evolution. The 1900’s can in hindsight be seen as a time for which the old tools of perception and conception were inadequate, and the new tools were exponentially more dangerous than any that had existed before.

Oppenheimer, Freud, Hitler, Drucker: all possessed means for which the ends were unforeseeable. Stalin, Mao, Roosevelt, Ford, Rockefeller and others were joined together in a configuration that was unimaginable a hundred years prior. The power of people to create and destroy had finally encompassed the planet. The atom bomb was not only a turning point in the collective topology of Japan. Hiroshima marked the turning point of all of Man. As Oppenheimer remarked, “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,” a quote from the Bhagavad Gita.

91 All the effects of decisions and proclamations by leaders of religions, governments and businesses in human history were converging on a point. The ideas and migrations of individuals and collectives were simultaneously yielding solutions and generating problems by orders of magnitude in pace and scale. The progression became exponential and geometric in its movement and depth, seemingly infinitely expanding and contracting consequentially.

The policies and decisions of leaders no longer affected the lives of the immediate hundreds or thousands of people. They affected millions and then billions.

Leaders tried to solve problems with command and control techniques. They employed psychology and planned obsolescence. They created chaos, psychotics, and the slacker.

In the end, the great leaders of the world generated a reactionary backlash that introduced a new term to the English language: “the suicide bomber.” Man individually learned to model himself in alignment with the New World Order. Men, women and children had been redesigned in the collective topology as “Hiroshimas of One,” to paraphrase the US Army ad campaign. Incidentally, the US Army has discovered no innovation to defeat the Hiroshima of One.

The world’s greatest fear is a small band of suicide bombers, eyes alight with religious fervor, pushing the buttons on the atom bombs strapped to their chests. Finally, the Age of Epistemological Superiority, spanning at least two thousand years, will culminate with the confrontation between the Davos man and the WMD‐ strapped suicide bomber.

If man will survive, it will be as dimensional man. If America is to survive, it will be without private ownership or corporate personhood to quell the progress of dimensional man. This is our new Manifest Destiny: to choose between the two futures.

From “America Is Not a Christian Nation” (Lind, for Salon):

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [sic], of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and, as the said States never have entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. ‐ Article 11,Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy ‐‐ a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another

92 enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support ... May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants ‐‐ while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid. ‐ George Washington in a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790

The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent ‐‐ that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgment. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mohammedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma, if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions. – President John Tyler, in an 1843 letter

One of the great strengths of the United States is … we have a very large Christian population ‐‐ we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values. – President Barack Obama, 2009

Lind is incorrect in his title. President Obama is dead on. The US is a nation unencumbered by the monoptical lens of a single brand of faith. We have as a collective of individuals the right to choose the source of our values and the means by which we adhere to them. We are not forced to follow leaders. We elect them, with the understanding that they must adhere to the same principles or laws that we do. We ‐ through our elected representatives ‐ design, implement and enforce those laws. All of us are accountable: we, as individuals, are accountable to our own, collective, legal corpus, which may be corrected, modified and otherwise improved; and our individual leaders to the collect, “We the People.”

It is a shame that Peter Drucker never quite grew comfortable, in my estimation with the bottom‐up topology of American government. Over the past year and a half becoming familiar with his work, and the redesigning of Democracy into corporate modalities, such as “shared leadership,” governance, accounting and so on, conducted by those who are inspired to marshal on in the spirit of Drucker (which will, one imagines, animate variously in the future), I find it unsatisfactory that Drucker wrote the book on Management, and not the book On Man.

When he divorced people from commodities, at least in his choice of subject, he divested his subject of realism. He also divested the means from meaning, and the value from values. It seems as though he spent a lifetime trying to manage putting them back together again. If his Humpty‐Dumpty had started on the ground, he wouldn’t have broken in the fall in the first place.

93 As it was, management, from Peter’s vertical, Epistemological perspective seemed always bedeviled by imperfection, a need for innovation or entrepreneurship, or a stronger third sector, improved productivity, lower labor costs, reduced regulation, diminished governmental competition, better leadership, better organization, more effective execution, a clarified mission, a designated consumer, a need or desire to satisfy, enhanced inducements for Knowledge Workers and on and on. Drucker could find good examples and ample poor ones to illustrate his points. Over the decades (GM the most recently pertinent), those citations were largely made redundant. The financial sector trumped all three of the sectors Drucker defined, stuck its greedy, dirty, risky fingers in all the pies, and came close to ruining all of them. It may still do so. Management failed. Deregulation failed. Leadership failed. Accounting (more than all of them) failed. Governance failed. Decentralization failed. Outsourcing failed. Knowledge Workers failed. Government failed. Business failed. Nonprofits failed. Missions failed. Goals failed. Vision failed. And Peter Drucker wasn’t here to put it all back together again.

At some point, Drucker must have realized there was a glitch in the matrix. Operationally, the theorem of management failed to adequately replace the hero, the charismatic flawed leader. Although tested thoroughly and proved in many societies over many decades, management did not prevent the second great depression. It turned out to be the cause.

The free market is unofficially a shattered myth. Greenspan is disgraced. Friedman is a laughingstock.

What of the best practices? I guess they seemed like good ideas at the time: culling middle management; crushing labor; opening the floodgates of immigration; minimizing shareholder governance and building a market on short‐term gains; unfettering monopoly; gutting or eliminating pensions and benefits for employees; disabling the New Deal social safety net; replacing it with stock portfolios; uprooting the society; downgrading the rights of citizens in the workplace; turning dollars into free speech; marketing for the immediate gratification of any perceived need; copyrighting anything that moved, breathed or otherwise expressed; practically deifying CEOs; creating a profit‐focused culture… At the height of this madness, if you asked any smirking MBA, Adam Smith was the only founding father America had. No one’s laughing now, as gun sales go through the roof.

Corporate image turned out to be a happy face sewn onto the head of a corpse, and at the heart of the corporate enterprise, there was no heart. Corporate Man came to be represented in the social topology as a zombie, dead but animated, feeding hungrily on the living.

Corporate mind is a hive mind. It is John Marshall’s golem, not Rabbi Loew’s. The corporate golum is unfettered by the limiting agency of the sacred. Both Loew’s and

94 Marshall’s creatures are made of the earth by man in the likeness of man, with an intelligence that is only as good as the maker of it. The problem, though, is that intelligence, by definition is generative. In biosystems, generative change, depending on the frame of reference, can be described as mutation, or, alternately as evolution.

In theological terms, a secular golem is the ultimate blasphemy, a manifestation of man’s desire to be the possessor of land and power, and the people who live on land or who are subject to power, and the control of the resources that flow from land, power, and people. In the vacuum that is the unmeasured Epistemological, or Cartesian mind, reason can justify anything a man can do, because what a man does is not who he is. Certainly, a theist confident in the sanctity learned or ascribed to in faithful reason, will estimate the virtue of character to be greater than it is, especially under duress, as when a man is contorted in his behavior by hunger or the horrors of war. We have ample proofs on either side of the ledger of good and evil, courage and corruption, by man in his relations with his fellows and his environment.

Frankenstein’s monster provides a literary analog for the artificial intelligence of the corporate hive mind, but there have been many penned by brave writers, since 1819. What is artificial intelligence other than the mind of the follower, the “dittohead?” No sooner had democracy formed in America, than did the forces that oppose freedom gain the foothold in our governmental apparatus, through which the whole mighty experiment might be undone. That the actor responsible is considered a hero (one cited by Drucker) today, should not be surprising to those familiar with the term samsara.

The artificial intelligence of the corporation is the social topology of human beings subsuming their native perceptual and conceptual qualities to serve an entity that is artificial, composed to produce an effect: profits. Or, in the case of the social sector corporation, the corporate composition is designed to replace the native service orientation, the spiritual motivations, of people, acting within their natural and independent collective topologies. A corporate artifice that performs services that assuage the consciences of corporate people or further erode the independence of individuals, and their trust in their ability to govern themselves.

If I were to write this as a morality play, it would go something like this. Drucker is Dr. Frankenstein, and the corporation is his monster. Drucker’s Igor is John Marshall. The Christian Drucker possesses neither the alchemy of the Rabbi Loew, nor the word of God with which to infuse his creation. Drucker also has no way to pull the plug on the corporate monster, even if he were so inclined. Drucker/Frankenstein tries to manage. In the end the monster outlives its creator, re‐creates him in his (the monster’s) image. The show is called “Repackaging,” but it doesn’t end yet.

95 Outside the theater, we, the audience, are made to witness and feed the monster’s growing appetites. No matter how much or how many it consumes, it is never engorged, never satisfied. This creature is driven by an insatiable hunger for land and blood, and it will not stop until it has consumed the Earth. The Jihadists rise up against it. They try feeding it barrels of oil to poison it, which the monster loves. So the Jihadist resort to reproducing faster than the monster’s helpers and offspring (it clones them of itself) can manufacture bullets.

I don’t know the ending yet.

I was thinking of what books to cite in reference to the Davos Man and the Hiroshima‐of‐One Man and their imminent confrontation. I hope it is not Cormac McCarthy’s Road that we collectively choose to travel. I hope it is not the Judge who is victorious in the trajectory of our collective Blood Meridian, as we hurtle towards our new Manifest Destiny.

There are two things that are both commodity and person: one is a slave; one is art.

Peter should have stayed with Keynes and taken up painting.

ENDNOTE

My Next Art Production Cycle

I began pre‐production on a new series of work called ART IS A SLAVE the day after sending the draft of this essay to Joseph Maciariello. I will submit it to EYEBEAM in New York City. I can see now that the waveform of my pre‐thesis and thesis projects commenced the morning of September 11, 2001. It’s been a long pull, and America has changed a lot, since that day.

I can identify with the Japanese artist Hirasawa. Cyanide is not an artist medium. Torture yields bad information and wrong confessions. On the subject of incarceration, I concede the argument to E.V Debs.

The end of innocence of a certain type is the part I get. American contemporary art has yet to digest the experience of 9/11. The compost is being brewed.

96 It is the Monday after I sent Joe the text. As is usually the case, a new piece of the puzzle arrived via email just in time to be late. Fortunately, because of the additive facet of dimensionist writing, I can refer to it even yet. Bill Ivey, former NEA director will be speaking at the Getty next in June. Bill will be expanding on his book, Arts, Inc. How Greed and Neglect Destroyed Our Cultural Rights. Unfortunately, the local Barnes & Nobles does not have the book in stock. For some reason, in fact, no Big Box retailer in a fifty‐mile radius carries it.

My artist friend Danielle Kelly wrote this statement for her project at Henri & Odette Gallery in Las Vegas, home of the American Dream, if you believed Dr. Thompson:

Bouse, Arizona, existing at the 33rd parallel, has by necessity become a site for the realization of a new school for design, craft, and fabrication.

Modeling itself after the female‐dominated, century old Bauhaus School, the women of Bouse, Arizona recognize the urgent demand for a resuscitation of the rigor, creativity, and feminine community that steered the School via the hallowed Weaving Workshop.

Bouse House recognizes that it is no longer possible to make Art in the way that we have up to now; scarcity of materials coupled with the collapse of industry and municipal infrastructure necessitates usefulness in form and materials to inspire the spirit and fulfill function. We cannot design new chairs; we must make do with the ones we have. We cannot weave new fabrics; we must re‐imagine fabrics we already have.

Our global society must begin to accept the contingencies of its newly nomadic reality. Design, as we have realized it up to now, is useless; there is no commodity. A separation of art and technology is necessary for survival. We will feed from the techno‐spirit, recreate it with our hands, and make new a means of physical global connect.

We are pleased to share with you a sampling of the work done up to now as part of the preliminary course of the Bouse House.

Without benefit of industry, civilization must again learn how to make its artists into builders.

Bouse House Elders Bouse, Arizona April, 2019

In her mini‐manifesto, Danielle reached nearly opposite very different conclusions, on the subjects of globalism, techne (which she poetically names “techno‐spirit”), the collapse of the muni‐industrial complex, etc. Her hopeful, sturdy and feminine response is correct, too, by my estimation, in its perception, conception and execution.

This is from an email we exchanged this morning. Danielle is describing the community‐building occurring in the context of her “Bouse House” exhibit:

97 The opening went well and still going‐there is a social dimension where every Thursday I go to the gallery and anyone who happens by or wants to can join me in making a wall piece, kind of a community quilt, for the gallery. It will grow over the course of the exhibition. So many people have contributed! Its funny, I think with the economy, stress, etc., people are really attracted to the scenario‐ Get people's hands busy, they chill and their walls drop, and relaxed engaged conversation ensues. It's really just heart‐warming to experience‐dorky, but so needed right now. The exhibition is the first phase of the project‐I am working on a "Bouse House" yearbook and manual right now. What do the BH workshops produce? Can't wait to figure that out...

On Prior Dimensional Systems Analysis Informing this Essay

A list of projects with some dates:

1. My Family (1964 to present; ongoing) 2. The World (1964 to present; ongoing) 3. America (1964 to present; ongoing) 4. Beckley, WV (1964 to present; ongoing) 5. California (1983 to present; ongoing) 6. Israel (1983 to present; ongoing) 7. New York City (1983 or ‐84 to present; ongoing) 8. University of Notre Dame (1982‐6) 9. The “Art Business” (1983 to present; ongoing) 10. Santa Fe (1986‐1997) 11. Native America (1986 to present; ongoing) 12. Scotland (1995 to present; ongoing) 13. Nashville (1997‐2003) 14. Yale University (2003 to present; ongoing) 15. Eureka, CA (2004) 16. Austin, TX (2005) 17. Marfa, TX (2006 to present; ongoing) 18. Kauai, HI (2005 to present; ongoing) 19. Las Vegas, NV (2006 to present; ongoing) 20. Los Angeles, CA (2005 to present; ongoing) 21. Claremont Graduate University, CA (2006‐9)

The reader may have noted that I (and nobody else, either) am on the list. That’s because, in the case of “I,” I arrived at two realizations:

• “The ‘me’ ‘I’ thought ‘I’ was never even existed.” • “I am not qualified for self‐analysis.”

These are fundamental self‐abrogations necessary for the reorientation of self to other, in service.

• “Put me in the place, where I can do the most good for the most people.

This is the perceptual/conceptual focusing agent. Bodhicitta is a foundational principle that over thousands of years in transcultural exchanges has been refined

98 to a fine tip, like a Samurai sword, by the multitudes of people who have embraced this ethic as a patterning device for life choices.

From the multi‐dimensional, unfathomably innovative and diverse database, the truly remarkable and generally technical and democratic Wikipedia, the bane and savior of Epistemology (as long as the grid sustains):

In Buddhism, bodhicitta[1] (Ch. 菩提心, pudixin, Jp. bodaishin, Tibetan jang chub sem, Mongolian бодь сэтгэл) is the wish to attain complete enlightenment (that is, Buddhahood) in order to be of benefit to all sentient beings trapped in cyclic existence (samsāra) who have not yet reached Buddhahood. One who has bodhicitta as the primary motivation for all of his or her activities is called a bodhisattva.

Through Yoga Asana and study with Tibetan Buddhist monks of renown, I have personal experience with the application of bodhicitta as daily practice. The “Put me” prayer is the best thing I could come up with on my own.

Peter Drucker Was this Close to Dimensional Realisation in his Management Design Concept (If Drucker Had Been Writing “On Man” Instead, I Bet He Would Have Pegged It)

From Management:

No institution can, therefore, exist outside of community and society as the Benedictine monastery, unsuccessfully, tried. Psychologically, geographically, culturally, and socially, institutions must be part of the community.

To discharge its job, to produce economic goods and services, the business enterprise has to have impacts on people, on communities, and on society. It has to have power and authority over people, e.g., employees, whose own ends and purposes are not defined by and within the enterprise. It has to have impact on the community as a neighbor, as the source of jobs and tax revenue, but also of waste products and pollutants. And, increasingly, in our pluralist society of organizations, it has to add to its fundamental concern for the quantities of life, i.e., economic goods and services, concern for the quality of life, that is, for the physical, human, and social environment of modern man and modern community.

This dimension of management is inherent in the work of managers of all institutions. University, hospital, and government agency equally have impacts, equally have responsibilities ‐‐ and by and large have been far less aware of them, far less concerned with their human, social, and community responsibilities than business has. Yet, more and more, we look to business management for leadership with regard to the quality of life. Managing social impacts is, therefore, becoming a third major task and a third major dimension of management.

These three tasks always have to be done at the same time and within the same managerial action. It cannot even be said that one task predominates or requires greater skill or competence. True, business performance comes first ‐‐ it is the aim of the enterprise and the reason for its existence. But if work and worker are mismanaged there will be no business performance, no matter how good the chief executive may be in managing the business.

99 Economic performance achieved by mismanaging work and workers is illusory and actually destructive of capital even in the fairly short run. Such performance will raise costs to the point where the enterprise ceases to be competitive; it will, by creating class hatred and class warfare, make it impossible in the end for the enterprise to operate at all. And, mismanaging social impacts eventually will destroy society's support for the enterprise and with it the enterprise as well.

Each of these three tasks has a primacy of its own. Managing a business has primacy because the enterprise is an economic institution; but making work productive and workers achieving has importance precisely because society is not an economic institution and looks to management for the realization of basic beliefs and values. Managing the enterprise's social impacts has importance because no organ can survive the body which it serves; and the enterprise is an organ of society and community.

In these areas also, there are neither actions nor results except of the entire business (or university, or hospital, or government agency). There are no "functional" results and no "functional" decisions. There is only business investment and business risk, business profit and business loss, business action or business inaction, business decision and business information. It is not a plant that pollutes; it is Consolidated Edison of New York, the Union Carbide Corporation, the paper industry, or the city's sewers.

Yet, work and effort are always specific. There is tension, therefore, between two realities: that of performance and that of work. To resolve this tension, or at least to make it productive, is the constant managerial task.

The Time Dimension

One complexity is ever‐present in every management problem, every decision, every action ‐ ‐ not, properly speaking ‐‐ a fourth task of management, and yet an additional dimension: time.

Management always has to consider both the present and the future; both the short run and the long run. A management problem is not solved if immediate profits are purchased by endangering the long‐range health, perhaps even the survival, of the company. A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future. The all too common case of the great man in management who produces startling economic results as long as he runs the company but leaves behind nothing but a sinking hulk is an example of irresponsible managerial action and of failure to balance present and future. The immediate economic results are actually fictitious and are achieved by paying out capital. In every case where present and future are not both satisfied, where their requirements are not harmonized, or at least balanced, capital, that is, wealth‐producing resource, is endangered, damaged, or destroyed.

Today we are particularly conscious of the time dimension in respect to the long‐range impact of short‐run economic decisions on the environment and on natural resources. But the same problem of harmonizing today and tomorrow exists in all areas, and especially with respect to people.

The time dimension is inherent in management because management is concerned with decisions for action. And action always aims at results in the future. Anybody whose responsibility it is to act ‐‐ rather than to think or to know ‐‐ commits himself to the future.

There are two reasons why the time dimension is of particular importance in management's job, and of particular difficulty. In the first place, it is the essence of economic and technological progress that the time span for the fruition and proving out of a decision is

100 steadily lengthening. Edison, in the 1880s, needed two years or so between the start of laboratory work on an idea and the start of pilot‐plant operations. Today it may well take Edison's successors fifteen years. A half century ago a new plant was expected to pay for itself in two or three years; today, with capital investment per worker twenty times that of 1900, the payoff period often runs to ten or twelve years. A human organization, such as a sales force or a management group, may take even longer to build and to pay for itself.

The second peculiar characteristic of the time dimension is that management ‐‐ almost alone ‐‐ has to live always in both present and future.

A military leader, too, knows both times. But traditionally he rarely had to live in both at the same time. During peace he knew no "present"; the present was only a preparation for the future war. During war he knew only the most short‐lived "future"; he was concerned with winning the war at hand. Everything else he left to the politicians. That this is no longer true in an era of cold wars, near wars, and police actions may be the single most important reason for the crisis of military leadership and morale that afflicts armed services today. Neither preparation for the future nor winning the war at hand will do any longer; and as a result, the military man has lost his bearings.

But management always must do both. It must keep the enterprise performing in the present ‐‐ or else there will be no enterprise capable of performing in the future. And it has to make the enterprise capable of performance, growth, and change in the future. Otherwise it has destroyed capital ‐‐ that is, the capacity of resources to produce wealth tomorrow.

The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different. There may be great laws of history, great currents of continuity operating over whole epochs. But within time spans of conscious decision and action ‐‐ time spans of years rather than centuries ‐‐ in which the managers of any institution operate, the uncertainty of the future is what matters. The long‐run continuity is not relevant; and anyhow, it can be discerned only in retrospect and only in contemplation of history, of how it came out.

For the manager the future is discontinuity. And yet the future, however different, can be reached only from the present. The greater the leap into the unknown, the stronger the foundation for the takeoff has to be. The time dimension endows the managerial decision with its special characteristics. It is the act in which the manager integrates present and future.

Administration and Entrepreneurship

There is another dimension to managerial performance. The manager always has to administer. He has to manage and improve what already exists and is already known. But he also has to be an entrepreneur. He has to redirect resources from areas of low or diminishing results to areas of high or increasing results. He has to slough off yesterday and to render obsolete what already exists and is already known. He has to create tomorrow.

Both St. Benedict and Peter Drucker, it seems, were Democracy‐averse. Democracy has no managers, in principle. We have trusted, elected servants.

In the performance of dimensional systems analysis, there is a point when the right information begins to “appear,” and the analyst’s task is not so much a function of

101 “digging up” leads and following them to a conclusion, as it is availing the data stream of one’s interest. It’s a Googlesque phenomenon, and describing it that way begs the chicken and egg question.

It is my experience that the question of hierarchies of meaningful sequences is transformed by the rhizome structure of Deleuzian exploration. TRON, a science fiction movie rich in AI and dimensional depiction, links to the epic quest tradition. The new model is more Eastern than Western. It is more Siddhartha than Holy Grail.

I visited the Dennison Library this afternoon and checked out a copy of Bill Ivey’s book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights. As it turns out, Bill is currently the director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, with offices in D.C. and Nashville at Vanderbilt University. From the Curb Center website:

The Vanderbilt Creative Campus initiative seeks to place creativity at the center of campus life – integrating art, media, design and creative expression into the curriculum; transforming campus spaces through public art and performance; connecting faculty and students across disciplines, with a special emphasis on the links between artistic and scientific practice; and building community, both on and off campus, by using art and creativity to animate conversations, reach across cultures, and bring people together around heritage, public service and difficult dialogues.

When I left Nashville in 2002, nothing like the Curb Center existed at Vanderbilt. I approached the then‐director of Watkins College of Art and Design to float the notion of a position there. He responded with a terse assurance that without an MFA, I couldn’t be hired there. It was after a yoga class. We were friends. I also spoke with my friend Andy van Roon, who had done yeoman’s work helping develop the infrastructure for a strong film and video production community in Nashville. Andy had been hired as a consultant for building a multidisciplinary apparatus for a small Midwestern Liberal Arts college. At that time, ambitious students were pining for the means to develop trans‐ skills in creative applications in the nation’s universities, with little success. The vertical hierarchies almost uniformly failed to allow these forward‐looking young people to progress dimensionally in the academic framework of most art departments. Although multi‐disciplinary programs had existed in Humanities for years, in response to the Black Mountain experiments and the critical discourse contingents, declaring a major still entailed confrontations with turgid policies that ensured mediocre outcomes. The American academy was proving anything but free or effective. Socialized programs in European academies were outperforming us in their commitment to new paradigmatic dimensional methods and the support of artists and collectives in pursuing community‐based projects.

The invisible narrative is this: In Nashville, we were competing internationally and winning. The Nashville‐based collectives DddD and 01 demonstrated the value of the dimensional approach over a period of several years, ahead of the national curve. At the time we were happy to get local press and recognition. In the end

102 though, for all our work, shared freely with the community for the most part, or at our own expense, it was the organization, the educational institution, that reaps the rewards. Vanderbilt reshuffled its faculty organizational structure to accommodate the new dimensional realism. They will charge students tens of thousands of dollars each year to practice with faculty who have not applied the principles in technical operations themselves, with exceptions.

To sum up my anecdotal synopsis: This is how the Epistemological arts go. The artist(s) who plow(s) the field of the plantation remains studiously unrecognized. The E‐nstitution appropriates the technical method. A media industrialist endows the academy. A failed policy wonk/manager is hired to manage the academy. He writes a book to demonstrate he is in actuality a friend of the artist and the arts. The institution uses inspirational platitudes to attract consumers (students). The financial sector reaps the rewards. And nothing changes. The school department bears the name of the industrialist, and gains prestige with the name of the director.

Over time, though, who knows? Underneath the campus, a few floors above the big machine, Chip Cox and I once had our first spine tingling exchanges on the various scientific and aesthetic definitions of 4D. He was a regional director of Internet 2 at the time, I think. The TV News Archive was operational.

It started with the question, “What is art?” and then another, “Who is an artist?” We shared the same hair stylist. After dinner, we made our way down to the lab. We used heaps of the latest AV gear he had lying about to demonstrate concepts. DddD was born a few months later. Art and science, a couple of guys, some tools – our experience is the root of the rhizome and always will be.

My characterization of Curb/Creative Campus and all may be anecdotal. Typically, that would make it plausibly deniable. Fortunately, however, my side of the argument is richly documented, because as an artist in Nashville, I worked as a public citizen, on purpose. I wrote a weekly column. I hosted a weekly art radio program on WRVU, the Vanderbilt radio station. I lobbied forcefully for percent‐for‐ art legislation, and successfully. I exhibited in the city’s museums, galleries, alternative art spaces, performance venues, in private homes, in foundations, in charity events. My work was regularly reviewed. My ideas were discussed and promoted in the public sphere in local media. I confronted business leaders, politicians, private citizens – individuals – with the meaning and value of art, and I insisted on it being incorporated in the collective discourse along with other matters commonly placed in front of culture. The governor of Tennessee appeared on my radio program when he was mayor of Nashville, but I knew him as a private painter. I learned to respect the democratic process, by participating in it. I witnessed how change occurs, and how it is suppressed firsthand. I understand the value of involvement. I learned what political freedom means. I made friends and enemies. I made personal mistakes and public ones. I accepted the challenges as they revealed

103 themselves. It helped that five days each week I trained in Thai Boxing, Ashtanga Yoga, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, with cops, soldiers and the greatest of everyday guys. We walked our talk. Nashville’s a small town. I even know a little bit about Bill Ivey’s private life. So, if I say that the Curb Center’s mission statement looks strangely familiar, and comment on the patterns in that social topology, it is from experience, documented and witnessed, that I speak. I wasn’t idly bragging at the beginning of this essay about uploading my archives for three months prior to executing this text. I was adding proofs to the proofs in the pudding.

Which is a prelude for this bit. What pisses me off about Curb and Bill and Vandy and the same old unregulated top‐down crap status quo, is that they managed to take a demonstrable perceptual + conceptual + dimensional production construct, analytics method, etc., and turn it into a high end product for the children of wealthy people, with some diversity quota/financial aid gymnastics “beneficiaries.” DddD, 01 and Art for Humans were not compensated for our contributions to this scheme. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a plantation society. We do the work in the fields; then the Epistemologists harvest the profits, and manage the message. The Lakota call people like that Wasicu. They steal the fat. This is why artists average incomes at 7K per annum. The best illustration is a neighborhood, like Chelsea, or the meatpacking district, more specifically. Now, it’s Dumbo, but it used to be The Village, where Jackson and the New York School would congregate to blow off steam.

Vandy U is a veritable fortress. As an institution, its internal control mechanisms are profound. The design protects the VU Corp. interests and power. It is an extensively managed knowledge container and dispenser. Vanderbilt, commemorating by name the brutal Robber Baron, manages who gets access, why and to what degree. It is a machine created to perpetuate a complexity of instruments, and is functional in a dimensional multi‐sector social topology. Vanderbilt is, as the saying goes, many things to many people. It is also many people to many things, just like Dartmouth. As an instrument of Epistemological authority and power, Vanderbilt, with its huge military‐industrial‐corporate contracts and elite endowments, is fully integrated into the New World Order. It is global minded, and so powerful that it can digest the dimensional aesthetic, reformat it to serve its own interests and gain prestige by its appearance of embracing the so‐called “difficult dialogues,” as an apparatus of democratic freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I missed the March 25 deadline for the initial query of interest in the position of development director for the Curb/Creative Campus initiative, by a few weeks. I vaguely remembered the name of the program coordinator with whom I spoke from my years in Nashville. I don’t know whether she recognized my name, when I gave it. When I asked if an extension might be possible, she tersely replied in the negative.

The position is described thus:

104

Vanderbilt University is seeking an innovative and entrepreneurial tenure‐track scholar to help build a new program in Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership. The program, broadly speaking, is devoted to teaching and scholarship that navigates the increasingly complex set of factors that shape American culture in the twenty‐first century: interdependent global markets and cultures; media consolidation; new media; emerging technologies; public policy; intellectual property; and changing demographics.

Research and teaching interests should be connected to one or more of the following areas: the economic, social, political, and cultural impact of new media and communication technology; creative industries and the organization and production of media, art, and entertainment; policy and regulatory issues in art, media, and culture; globalization and culture; and creativity and design in organizations and society.

The successful candidate, who could come from any of a number of disciplines, will be appointed to a home department appropriate to that individual’s scholarship, but will be expected to engage in interdisciplinary teaching and to participate in building a culture of creativity at Vanderbilt University.

Bill Ivey writes (Arts, Inc., pg 9‐10):

...But cultural change always exacts a price. The rise of vernacular art made possible by technology enriched America’s expressive life, but the market‐driven system producing films, records, and broadcasts evolved with little attention to the way the creation and distribution of art in America linked up to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The problem lay not with these transforming technologies, and certainly not with the blues musicians, movie stars, and vaudevillians who provided early cultural “content.” Instead, the public interest was subverted by the business practices that made up the rules and laid out the playing field for producing and consuming our modern mainstream culture.

The new media required big investments and complex distribution organizations. Inevitably, market forces and corporate practices began to reshape the relationship between audiences and culture. Increasingly, Americans became consumers, rather than makers, of art…

By the 1920s new arts companies offering new arts products were converting engagement in art into an act of consumption. The notion of participation was reshaped‐ its sense of doing replaced by passive activities like purchasing a recording or attending a concert or exhibition. If we think of expressive life as split between the culture we take in and the culture we create, the commoditization of emerging art forms pumped up the taking in (consumption) at the expense of making art.

I am writing this passage on the tenth anniversary of the Columbine Massacre, the day when two Hiroshima‐of‐One teens blasted twelve of their peers into oblivion with small arms. According to a chronicler of the event, one was a psychopath, and the other was a normal teen (Dave Cullen, The Rachel Maddow Show). Media mogul Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest women in the world, whose expression of support for Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, which came at a critical juncture, was said to have influenced the election, decided to cancel a program on Columbine featuring Cullen. According to TMZ:

105 Today's episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" was supposed to mark the 10‐year anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School ‐‐ but not anymore.

Oprah just announced on her website she's decided to pull the episode: "I decided to pull the Columbine show today. After reviewing it, I thought it focused too much on the killers. Today, hold a thought for the Columbine community. This is a hard day for them."

This is media management of the highest order. Here’s what Cullen wrote about for Slate and spoke about on Rachel Maddow’s broadcast, and presumably discussed on Oprah, which would have outlined the facts for a vast audience:

Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they (the teenaged mass killers) hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the "worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights on eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.

Real Creativity, Real Innovation, Real Effectiveness

America – and it’s impossible for me to speak on this matter as it manifests in other social topologies with the same experiential certainty – is a managed society today. Peter Drucker succeeded. The most managed aspects of the American life are:

• Health • Organizational and individual behavior • Psychology • Occupational behavior • Risk • Commoditization • Time • Assembly • Reproduction and childrearing • Politics • Policing • Domestic behavior • Food • Education

106 • Dreams (aspirations) • Culture • Choice • Finance • Consuming (of goods) • Expression • Science • Transportation and mobility • Communication • Freedom

The list could be easily expanded to add detail and categories. Although a thorough treatment exploring the specificity of management applications in American society is a vast undertaking, and worth undertaking, for the purposes of this paper a brief scan of symptoms is sufficient. Topologically, the American is typically pre‐selected (abortion, or denominal eugenics). Birth almost always occurs in a managed hospital or clinic. Although a significant minority of individuals are uninsured (insurance equals risk management, by assessment, for profit), insurance in itself is selective. Children are mandated to undergo processing (for immunization, for example), and although opting out of the process is possible, the ramifications in limiting subsequent choices are serious and far reaching. Education is controlled for age, and options are managed for selection. The more wealth and stability a family possesses, the more options. The American police state ‐ or state police (in the generic sense) – is/are empowered to exert management protocols on nearly every facet of human interaction. From the most minor infraction to the stuff of the Ten Commandments, legislation provides authorities and their enforcers the means to intervene. As a result, as elsewhere noted, America is the most incarcerated people in the free world – an oxymoron, if there ever was one. Incarceration is selective.

The most highly managed aspects of American life are perceptual. Technology has enabled American managers to compile vast data on the inner lives and proclivities of Americans. The telecommunications industry and the US government are essentially unified in their mission to monitor, selectively or generally, the transmissions of information from an individual to another individual or entity by electronic means. Space and time management are aided by advanced and expansive sociological and psychological research, which allows corporations and the various government or private agencies – from the neighborhood association to the NSA – to monitor or determine behavior and create modifications in it. The management of behavior is spread throughout the three Drucker sectors. Morality, independence of thought, and acceptable actions are managed through education and religious instruction, penalties (both social and relational) and selection from sector to sector. Advancement in the social topology is determined.

Because the management structure is top‐down, the advancement of an individual through the various stages of power gathering is vertical. An American is

107 encouraged to grow in power, which is defined in terms of breadth of management. The more resources, the more property, including human capital (a euphemism for slavery in a management system), one is authorized to manage, the more powerful one is.

Exceptions to all these management characteristics are possible. They serve a variety of functions. Those who strive to be exceptional are, on the one hand, encouraged to do so. The more exceptional the individual, the more attention from management the exception‐striving person derives. Depending on the exception’s motivations, which are evaluated in terms of potential usefulness to the management structure, the better his chances for attainment within the social topology. Additionally, exceptions are valuable in the same way that winners in Las Vegas are valuable. House‐beaters prove that success is possible, even when the odds manufacture systemic assurances of near‐total losses for the consumer of chance.

Failure is commoditized, as are all aspects of life, thought or expression, wherever and whenever possible. Failure is characterized as both good and bad. It is good failure, if it leads one to make better management‐oriented choices in the future. It is bad, if the individual has failed as a result of resistance to management, or some other anti‐management conduct. The procedure of failing is selective, as are all the other procedures in the management categories of American life. “Failing up” is the trajectory for pre‐selected individuals and groups.

For the most part, the list above is reductive for the description of individual managing practice. The inference is that the individual in the collective is a function of more complex dimensional analysis. The criteria are relative and contingent, but not in the Marxian sense of definition. Power is dimensional, and so is the relationship of the individual and collective. However, dimensional analysis does not stop there. Psychology, or rather, understanding the mind in order to manage its effects, is likewise compartmentalized functionally. A dimensional analysis of America cannot be thorough until the analyst explores freedom, and how it is now managed in America. The US, is after all, “The Home of the Free.” That is the overarching narrative.

Psychology is of paramount value to management, consequently. As an industry, it has advanced into every facet of the three management sectors. Government employs psychologists in a vast array of applications, from advising the torture of prisoners, to supervising the dissembling of families. Perception is a key to management effectiveness. Where management proves ineffectual, perceptual management is applied. Psychology suggests remedies. Psycho‐remedies range from drugs to lobotomy or electric shock. As strident officials are fond of saying, “All options are on the table,” or in some cases, the couch. Businessmen use psychology to sell products, evaluate or select human capital, improve performance, develop strategy and improve tactics. Ministers, or managers of spiritual matters, are often now hard to distinguish from psychologists, since both draw from the same well of

108 data and advice. The Catholic Church consults psychologists before performing exorcisms. The priest pedophile is managed with psychological treatment, spiritual advice, physical isolation, and legal protection. At least that was the model for a while.

Financial management is its own discipline, according to its practitioners. The management of personal and collective wealth is monitored and supervised by a professional class that is prone to celebrity in extremity. A good financial manager will be asked to opinionate on all human matters, as though financial appropriation is identical to wisdom. All the categories of management strenuously defend their independence from punitive regulation. Management as an order strives to be accountable only to itself and the selective morality best suited to effectively enhance desired results and satisfy perceived or projected needs. Financiers are in effect, managers of collective and individual behavior, stability, power and prestige. They operate dimensionally. As a sector in society, finance strives to optimize gain from every transaction, selectively, for only a marginal percentage of Americans are positioned so as to benefit from the finance sector’s machinations.

Managing who proffers American noblesse oblige or dictates the terms of the “trickling down” of wealth is a combined management function of government and business sectors. The two sectors in this respect are functionally inseparable. The rotation of managers between the two sectors is systemic, entrenched and consequential in effect. Consultants and lobbyists comprise a special class of management. The Jesuits of old are a proper analog for American consultants. They are brought in to do managerial dirty work. Lobbying as a management function is indicative of access and rewards. The lobbyist manages message and personnel. Both, figuratively, “put out fires.” They manage successes that might undermine management ambitions and failures that might reveal the costs of managerial excess. Mercenary is an adequate descriptive term for lobbyist.

American language in all sectors is managed. Words and phrases are designated as inappropriate, and managers monitor usage as indicators of obeisance. How and why the offending words arrive at their status is secondary to their usefulness for selection. How an individual responds to fluidly strict and casual codes of linguistic exchange determines the individual’s willingness to abide by management priorities. The key effect is both perceptual and conceptual. An individual’s capacity to recognize managerial determination and accept it, and respond through action accordingly, will largely determine the individual’s advancement.

The good manager in each sector must be fluent in the dimensional practice of management. To put it another way, all a manager must do to be a good manager is to accept the top‐down topology of managerial practice. Other factors affect an individual’s capacity for overall viability. To be the manager of a major corporation requires of the prospect extreme discipline, adherence, bordering on fanaticism, to the maxims of management, not just in practical terms, or technical effects, but in the rightness of managerial ecology.

109

A great manager, like Peter Drucker, must be an expert social ecologist. He must display an advanced cognition of management’s necessary interventions in all aspects of the individual and collective topology, and the environments of both. He must also understand the power of time management. The great manager must even practice self‐management, a discipline that is now taught in executive management academies. The top manager then becomes a system proof, as well as a system release. If the system is attacked, and accountability is unavoidable, the top manager is made the scapegoat, in order to minimize greater damage to the managerial system. A top manager accepts this as a facet of his job description. The system, whenever possible, seeks to normalize such self‐sacrifice for the management collective, by rewarding sacrificial managers with better appointments elsewhere in the management configuration. This is “failing up” in the top ranks, and explains why the CEO feels justified in comparing himself to the martyr in religion.

The American domestic partner (a managerial euphemism) is a home manager. Individuals are encouraged to correlate family life to a managed business arrangement. When negotiations breakdown, mediators can be hired to resolve disputes or improve familial effectiveness. The home itself is intensely managed, from its purchase, to its equipment, to the performance of its human components, mission, values, health, internal discourse and entertainments, diet, consuming patterns, location in government operations, commoditization, risks and protections, and so on. The home profile is a vital determinant in managerial selection in all applications.

Home failure is its own managed industry, or dimensional combination of industries, as diverse as the components that make up the domestic environment. The home is the primary source of revenue for the managed society. As the current economic crisis demonstrates, and as the American narrative goes, the home is the foundation for society. “A man’s home is his castle.” In fact, a man’s home is a key determinant in his caste in the management topology. Nearly every domestic decision is scrutinized as a managerial indicator. Home management is the water cooler discourse of today’s American workplace. While failing up is possible, especially when pre‐selection is a factor, domestic stability is a sign to management that the managed individual has prioritized correctly. The managed vocation is operationally paramount.

When a manager is benevolent towards an individual some form of domestic distress, the manager is reinforcing the maxim that management is good for the individual, by knowing when to be good to him. Such oblige is understood, from a management perspective to be quid pro quo, in favor of management. Again, these are House Rules. The exception is permissible on occasion to reinforce the illusion that participation is a function of choice, in this case, as opposed to chance in the case of the casino. Structurally, the schematic is identical. The consumer will almost inevitably lose, eventually.

110 Managing the individual’s capacity for learning is also vital. This is achieved through a combinative approach. Learning is reliant on proper diet, adequate rest and recovery, integrated and sequential instruction, reinforcement, variation and verification, etc. Learning also must have meaning and value. In America, we can review the symptoms in all these areas ad infinitum. It is the effects that management is concerned with, over time. Management and control are hardly antonyms. Management has attacked public education and unionized teachers for generations, whittling away at the field until it can wrest the primary vehicle of learning from the bottom‐up democracy. The tactics are internal and external, applied as constant pressure. Reducing teacher pay and prestige, divesting the self‐ governing apparatus and replacing it with productivity measures, chipping away at domestic independence and encouraging cognitive retardation: these are only a few policies, practices employed to bankrupt free, unmanaged local education. The most effective approach to debasing public education is to install good managers in power positions within the system. These agents then can campaign for the so‐called best practices of management. Meanwhile, in the study hall, a student can buy sugar treats produced by Corporate Multinationals. The student will wear clothes made in China and branded by a Corporate Multinational. The student will watch hours of television produced and distributed by Corporate Multinationals. The student will listen to Corporate Multinational music, while doing his homework. The student will ride to and from school in a vehicle built by a Corporate Multinational. Along the route, the student will be bombarded by advertisements for Corporate Multinationals. The student will go with his family on excursions and entertainments managed by Multinational Corporations (like the theater, the theme park, the professional sports event). The student’s family will shop for the student at the Corporate Multinational mall or Corporate Multinational retailer, which are incrementally distinguishable only, according to their marketable identities and preferred markets, and so on. A student is not taught management. An American student is managed fundamentally. At all times, if management is successful, the student will be aware first of management’s choice for him, and second, if at all, that he has any freedom of choice.

The chemistry of management is as pervasive across sectors as management engineering. This is to say that management fabricates or manages science dimensionally. Managed chemistry is consumed by the individual in pill or edible form, in the bottle or package containing them, in the fuel the truck consumes to transport the commodity to the consumer, in the air that one is forced to breathe, in the water one buys or drinks from the tap. Management relies on engineers to implement the social ecology in concrete form. Science in all its applied fields is managed through the allocation of monies, prestige and appointments. Management is concerned with the results. To that end the management topology in America combines the efforts and powers of all three sectors to generate science that benefits management aims, whenever possible.

When Peter Drucker suggests that climate change and multinational corporations are management’s most pressing future concerns, what he might be encoding is the

111 reality that the success of multinational corporations is not only reliant on the prime causes of climate change, but that management of the science of climate change is a potential opportunity for business. The question of whether climate change is caused chiefly by corporate activities or tri‐sector management or corporate management beneficiary (Superclass) is not suggested. Science that indicates a causal connection is everywhere to be refuted or obfuscated or disrupted, until such time that the management society can derive profit from the phenomenon.

As I said above, delving into the particulars of this dimension of Management, its American expression, is fertile territory for exploration. That management is a global phenomenon is a foregone conclusion for its advocates. The realities on the ground, as the euphemism puts it, suggests otherwise, especially now. Any American can ask himself to what extent his life is managed, and the answer will indicate, proportionally, to what extent he is in fact an American.

In broad evaluative terms, a good indicator of the extent to which a modern society is managed is the fertility rate. This is a moderately hopeful sign for Americans, since we are at least still replacing our population. Japan, on the other hand, is not. The European nations are not. The relatively unmanaged populations of other nations are burgeoning, to the great consternation of the Davos Man. Nations or societies that are still controlled by charismatic leaders or alternate governmental models such as theocracies or anti‐capitalist forces are fertile, even exponentially so. Maintaining the current nuclear stockpiles is still a hedge against those populations and their leaders, and so the organization of managed society enforces strict selection on the apocalyptic technologies for obliteration of huge populations through conflagration or chemistry.

Freedom for the forces of management, whether freedom exercised by the individual or the global collective, humanity, is a secondary concern. Freedom is even a secondary concern for Davos Man, except when it is his freedom to exercise power that is at stake. What is of primary importance for the Superclass is conservation of the top‐down configuration in management, and the bottom‐up flow of wealth, power and prestige. This instinct for self‐preservation is in direct contraposition to American democracy. Management, as Peter Drucker outlines it, is the applied dimensional science of insuring the conservation of the Superclass as the global ruling construct. It is a design for the transfer of creativity, innovation, and freedom of humankind into the control sphere of a loosely organized band of international nomads and social chameleons, who maintain visibility or invisibility by choice, whenever possible. Great wealth, access and power permit one to manage appearance, the perception of others for oneself.

The most creative act of man and woman is reproducing. What force has management applied to mastering reproduction! Nothing requires more innovation than the raising of a healthy child. What force has management applied to conquering parents and the role of the nurturing society! The leadership of people is

112 its most elevated form of service. What force has management applied to the eradication of leadership, and its replacement with management!

Peter Drucker, for his role in this, is no less a villain than any one can name. A dimensional portrait of Drucker, or any other Management or Epistemological Man could be produced by anyone capable of cutting and pasting in Photoshop. Simply take a JPEG of Gerhard Richter’s Uncle Rudi and paste Drucker’s or the CEO’s face on over the face in the Richter painting. The title will always be, “The Banality of Evil.”

Peter Drucker’s interest in Japan and Japanese art is competitive and comparative. It is a humble proclamation that Drucker managed to produce, or was instrumental in producing, a more pervasive social ecology, a more controlled society, in the West in fifty years, than hundreds of years of collective and individual topological progression yielded in Japan. Peter Drucker, subtly is revealing his pride in his creation. Social Ecology is Drucker’s medium. He is its foremost practitioner. His design orientation is called Management. He is not a technician or laborer, and therefore not an artisan. He is, by his own definition, an Epistemological artist. Since there is no such thing, he is only an Epistemologist. In ancient terms that would qualify Drucker to be a steward for the Superclass, for which his individual topology made him well suited. Being a humble servant, Drucker eschewed such demarcations, preferring the relative ease of an academic’s life in Claremont.

When man is nearly defeated, and his freedoms dispersed or destroyed, and the few reign supreme over the brokenhearted many, the Earth will shake off the tyrant and all but a few of the rest, and start again. Crisis, history has proven repeatedly and in waves, is relative, and dimensional.

As for the Davos Man? It is worth ending with a snapshot of Davos 2009, penned by Daniel Gross for Slate (“Davos Man, Confused”). I will include the account in its entirety.

For centuries, historians have debated whether history is propelled by Great Men (and Women), human forces of nature who bend events and systems to their will, or by vast impersonal forces (communism, capitalism, globalization) that render even the most powerful of us a mere reed basket floating in a massive river. There's no session on the subject at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But at least with regard to finance and business, the consensus seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.

Ordinarily, Davos is a Great Men kind of place, as the motto of this year's gathering implies: "Shaping the post‐crisis world." The people who show up here—political leaders, scientists, entrepreneurs, musicians, and, above all, businesspeople—have all shown an ability to

113 impose themselves on history. Otherwise, they wouldn't be invited. And yet in the many discussions held here about the recent global financial debacle, the question of human agency is shunted to the side.

At a CNBC event yesterday, groups of 10 to 12 people sat at tables and mooted three questions: Which policy assumption failed? Which regulatory failure proved to be the largest systemic shock? And which market failure proved most damaging? The answers were obvious: poor regulation of the shadow banking system, mispricing of risk, the failure of models. But there was very little talk about the people who helped design and justify the systems, the mispricing, and the models. At one point, someone in the crowd stood up and said: "It's intriguing nobody is to blame. In other industries, there are consequences if you make toxic products that hurt people. Policy makers need to make it clear that there are serious consequences for that type of behavior." Big applause! And yet aside from the odd mention of Alan Greenspan and an oblique reference to Robert Rubin, the former treasury secretary who became a senior executive at Citigroup, there was little talk of individual players who had responsibility.

An all‐star dinner that included bravura performances from behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman (brilliant and charming), historian Niall Ferguson (brilliant and charming), and Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb (brilliant and narcissistic) focused on the dramatic events of mid‐September 2008. It was off the record, but Taleb asked journalists to please quote him. While not naming names, Taleb had nasty things to say about traders and exulted at the fall of Lehman Bros. But beyond that, the talk was mostly of systems that didn't work and the nameless minions who simply couldn't help themselves. Most of the talk was of the models and the market. And today, at a lunch that was testimony to the transformative power of the individual—it included Great Men Bill Gates, serial entrepreneur Richard Branson, and Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus, the father of micro‐lending, who talked about philanthropy and capitalism—Gates stumbled when asked about the failures. "Here we had some severe imbalances that led to, when people finally looked at their savings rate, you got the knock‐on effect," he fumfered before mentioning Keynes and Soros. "I don't think we can find the villain and point at him and say, Aha, he did it."

The dismissal of human agency is ironic, but also predictable. Just as financial markets in the United States privatize profits and socialize losses, Davos and other conferences like this privatize success (by chalking it up to individuals) and socialize failure (by blaming it on large systemic problems).

The preferred strategy at Davos is to simply ignore failure. By and large, screw‐ups don't make the agenda. It's just not that sort of place. If you screw up, you don't get invited, and you don't show up. This explains why I couldn't see a single economist or official associated with the Bush administration on the roster, and why there are very few American bankers at Davos this year. As John Thain's career at Merrill came to a close, he suffered the ultimate indignity: Bank of America told him it wouldn't be a good idea for him to come to Davos. The only thing worse than being attacked is being ignored. You don't matter anymore. You're not even worth mentioning. As World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab put it: Davos is not a place for "has‐beens."

Ultimately, the "blame the system" ethos will undermine the spirit of Davos. The notion that large forces—cheap money, liquidity, mispriced risk, inefficient markets—are responsible for success or failure is an affront to Davos Man, who believes that his prominence is due to merit and hard work.

114 NOTES; ADDITIONAL COMMENTARIES; UNFINISHED, DISPLACED AND INCONCLUSIVE OR DRAFT ESSAYS

A Dream

In my dream, I visited a gallery. It reminded me of Casa Sin Nombre, a cute little space in Santa Fe, long gone, where I once saw a small exhibit of William Burroughs shot pieces and photos by – was it Ginsburg? I can’t recall. Anyway, the interior was Santa Fe Style with wood floors or Saltillo, vigas and candles.

Then, I stepped through the door to a huge patio restaurant. I was no longer in Santa Fe. I was in LA. The tables had umbrellas. What a celebrity crowd! Jeffrey Vallance was the first one I noticed, and he me at the same time. Other colorful characters nodded or waved as the hostess led me through, and one particularly flamboyant fellow (I think), playfully tried to invite me to join in at the table. I demurred, pleasantly.

On the opposite side of the plaza was a gymnasium for fighters, but after a brief hug of my old Muay Thai guro, I began to train a little on the bags. Shortly later, all the teachers left to conduct a children’s class, leaving the gym empty and the children’s toys lying about. I could hear the peals of joyful play as I left to return to the restaurant. By now I was hungry, but the restaurant was closing. Though they kindly offered to serve me, I declined and moved on, not wishing to keep them after what had obviously been a busy shift.

Past the plaza was a bungalow court. In between the two spaces a major fashion shoot and performance was happening. The models, photographers, directors and audience were animated. The atmosphere and visuals were dazzling. I became subject to the attentions of several of the models, who playfully accosted me. I managed to politely and with the appropriate regrets fend away their advances.

Beyond on the pathway past the Route 66‐esque bungalows, small groups sat at tables relaxing. Another photoshoot was going on. It looked to be a feature piece on some actors. I recognized one as the fellow who had portrayed Chuck Barris of Gong Show fame in a movie chronicling Barris’ sideline as a government assassin. We nodded as I passed and he posed.

I returned home to my girlfriend.

On Sentience and Art

Art is a sentience enhancement device (method).

115 Note: For the purposes of this paper, “sentience” is used to encompass a totality of mechanisms attached to seeing, perceiving and conceiving. Where differentiation expands on understanding, the author will strive to specify terms. Also, where authorial contributions improve clarity, references will be included or attached.

Sentience in All Things

Presuppose the sentience of the orb (Gaia Theory, Japanese animism, other). Presuppose the contingent sentience of all things of the orb.

Lovelock: “Gaia is an attempt to find the largest living creature on Earth."

From Wiki‐entry on Autopoiesis:

Autopoiesis literally means "auto (self)‐creation" (from the Greek: auto – αυτό for self‐ and poiesis – ποίησις for creation or production), and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.

An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 78)

[…] the space defined by an autopoietic system is self‐contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection. (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 89)

[See below (mushroom); and Question: What is the relationship between linkage and cloning to autopoiesis?]

Analog: In art, the digital file can be reproduced ad infinitum in theory (although in practice this is untrue, given the physical nature of the process; temperature variance, ambient humidity, ink discontinuities among batches, etc., effect output); the same image displayed on a hundred monitors will never be seen exactly the same on any two monitors. What is the resistance or tension between the thought of infinity and the actuality of conditions? Are all the prints of the same artwork? Are they one artwork? Can they be one artwork (whole edition) + one artwork (each print) + an artwork that is both one whole artwork and the several iterations, each independent and related simultaneously? The master print or proof + original plate + additional drawings or plans (text) – are these also art? Ownership and martket definitions have produced a kind of “answer.”

116

“Sentience” is one definition of perceptual ectology that exists in a dimensional family of terms fundamental to the process of cognitive synthesis, of conception, inherent to technical consideration of creativity. Others include awareness, quality (as qualia), consciousness, intent, sapience; and these awarenesses form the fundamental ectology of human society, but are not limited to the social function of man. Man belongs to the environment as a , animated, in sentience, or better, a synthesis of awarenesses.

In seeing, sentience is a function of social ecology encountering stimulus, followed by an individual response. The response is a formulation, motivated by perceptual ectology.

Perceptual ectology is a combinative form, dimensional by implication, compositing:

• An object • Seer • Internalized social topology (in the seer) • An overarching narrative animated by inclusive sentience

Sentience, Divinity and Property (Market Competition)

Science cannot affirm or deny the existence of sentience. Science cannot affirm of deny the existence of divinity. Science is oriented to both awareness and divinity identically.

Note: With regards social topologies, it seems clear that the dimensional set including these components will exhibit tension, if a polar relationship is presumed between the point of sentience and the point of divinity located on a horizontal triangular plane with the object, if the element of private ownership is an extruding factor enforcing competition. If one agent presumes to own the seen thing, especially if the presumption of divinity factors, and a second agent presumes only sentience in the seen thing, within a shared dimensional ectology, the dynamics will entail conflict over appropriation. The first agent presumes usage, whether usage occurs, which may be otherwise characterized as a right to usage, potentially a divine right. The second presumes the entire landscape or set (setting) to be divine, including the object and the seer himself, on relatively (therefore) equal terms. The social topology of Japan reviewed over centuries presents an amalgam of interests in conflict, formatted in an enduring unresolved state. As an example of apparent conformity of principles to presumption, Japan, with its command and control social complex seems to have offered an interesting proof to Drucker’s complex and dimensional model, responsive to Locke and Shinto, capable in socio‐ecological

117 terms of converting management or top‐down authority with bottom‐up compliance, and comforted horizontally by a time‐proven proclivity for adaptation of multiple definitions of divinity. Social relations in Japan ‐ complex and formal, but mutable and mitigated by honorable mechanisms or for release or temporary suspension of normative intervention – apparently struck Drucker as adequate for the task of both historic conservation and cultural viability in the contemporary milleu.

On Sentience and Divinity in the Social Topology

The existence of sentience and the divine is a proposition within the composition of a social topology. Man acts on his synthetic ectology. Synthetic ectology is harmonized with social topology by numerous means, the most valuable of which is art.

The crafting of a Samurai sword, as we have seen, is the emblematic action of combinative collective‐individual | response>expression / animation in Japanese social topology. The dimensional composition includes:

• Shinto • Craft • Science (trial and error) • Observation and organization (management of people, resources, effects and elements to achieve a result) • History • Inferred or possible usage • Market viability • Collective competition and cooperation (as in a guild) • Individual excellence • Lineage • Familial heritage • Cultural relevance • Martial effectiveness • + More

What is the seen thing in this configuration? Is not the procedure an object (It was for NOVA)? The response is embedded throughout the crafting process for the swordmaker. The sword is the expression, but is not the entirety of the procedure expressive of the social topology?

On Sentience as an Infusion of Quality(­ies)

118 If the Samurai sword possesses “soul” (of Japan, of the swordmaker, of the elements that comprise the making of the sword, and so on), and this “soul” is identified as sentience, does the swordmaker alone bear the responsibility of infusing it into the sword, through the proper management of materials, process, people, etc., involved in the sword’s fabrication? How does swordmaking differentiate from the manufacture of art (painting, sculpture or drawing)?

In terms of sentience, the two expressions are dissimilar not at root, but by degree and in function. A proper comparison requires the recognition of design excellence in the manufacture of the Samurai, as representative of the Japanese social topology.

It is the tip of the Samurai sword (relative to the totality of the sword in its expressive and utile functions) that is comparative to the phenomenon of dimensional art (relative to social topology). Art is the point.

Unscienced Versus Unconditioned

If that any wight ween a thing to be otherwise than it is, it is not only unscience, but it is deceivable opinion. ­ Chaucer.

Science is but one component in social topology.

In a refined social topography, an individual can still function. In gaming, assigned functions provide the agent with performance expectations and capabilities. In science fiction, the concept of the replicant was introduced by Philip K. Dick and explored by others. These notions have been present in philosophy and literature for centuries in various forms. In science, robotics has successfully obviated human repetitive function in many applications. In economics the concept of labor can sufficiently dehumanize the employee for the purposes of productivity to the extent that employers have felt justified in subjecting their workers to degradations now classified as criminal. The objectification of human beings by other human beings has a long ignominious history. The presence of toplogical conditions conducive to the abstraction of human form in service to idealogy or production is worthy of attention, from a framework of permeable sentience.

Theoretically, imagining the phenomenon of an in a mirror scenario has produced interesting mind problems and science fiction, specifically for the examination of unconditioned response. In philosophy, the presence of impossible‐to‐resolve elements in such considerations, absent representation, ensure Epistemic uncertainty. The solution is, of course, art, and the Cartesian reductive movie screen of the mind is solved by the reducible form of organic and dynamic symmetry.

119 is problematic, because of vagaries in exclusive definitions of science as a procedural discipline. For instance, can we call the adaptation of the indigenous Amazonian tribesman unscientific, if barring outside intervention he can by highly complex evolution through social topology develop a sustainable and productive homeostatic relationship with his demanding ectology? The short answer is “yes.” Is the distinction meaningful? The answers are both “yes” and “no.” If one’s reference is comparative and competitive, involving ownership and market forces, the unscienced tribesman is not only unscientific in his approach to representing reality (also true of art). If the lens through which we observe our tribesman is the “Sentience Lens,” the value of the tribesman’s vast knowledge (especially his applied or survival knowledge, or technical proficiency as achievement of sustainable survival) is high, if not awesome. To recognize the importance of a social topology that indicates reverence for sentience in such an example requires the reformatting of the top‐down hierarchies of knowledge‐objects. Ultimately, advanced and primitive are definitions that are prone to abuse and misunderstanding.

Ectological Effects

The effects of ectology upon man are the sensory data to which he responds. The heat of fire can attract or repel an individual, based on other conditions.

The Figure on Abstraction

Science is both abstract and representational. Science synthesizes the progressions of data known or knowable to man, through his senses and the machines man creates to analyze data, as sense amplifiers.

Art as a medium for representation solves the issues of homunculi, while preventing an emergence of disciplines focused on fabricated unscienced androids and correlating dehumanization in the social topology. It is interesting to note here the prohibitions against figurative representation in Islamic social topologies and Presbyterian culture.

Sensory Amplification

Thought can act as a sense amplifier. Perception can inflect or distort the sensory data. Art can act as a sense amplifier, especially when it is applied to problems unsolvable by other disciplines. A social topology limited along scientific or religious lines or restrictions is handicapped. In such cases, obvious data and solutions remain for useful purposes invisible.

120

Opening avenues of investigation by removing prohibitions in perceptual frameworks can produce unexpected positive results.

(Science cannot confirm or deny that the Earth is not a sentient.) in this sense is also related to .

(Example)

From The Independent: The largest living organism ever found has been discovered in an ancient American forest.

The Armillaria ostoyae, popularly known as the honey mushroom, started from a single spore too small to see without a microscope. It has been spreading its black shoestring filaments, called rhizomorphs, through the forest for an estimated 2,400 years, killing trees as it grows. It now covers 2,200 acres (880 hectares) of the Malheur National Forest, in eastern Oregon.

The outline of the giant fungus stretches 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometres) across, and it extends an average of three feet (one metre) into the ground. It covers an area as big as 1,665 football fields.

The discovery came after Catherine Parks, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in La Grande, Oregon, in 1998 heard about a big tree die‐off from root rot in the forest east of Prairie City.

Using aerial photos, Ms Parks staked out an area of dying trees and collected root samples from 112. She identified the fungus through DNA testing. Then, by comparing cultures of the fungus grown from the 112 samples, she determined that 61 were from the same organism, meaning a single fungus had grown bigger than anything anyone had ever described before.

From Tom Volk’s history of the humungous fungus:

One interesting offshoot of these findings of humongous fungi has been a scientific discussion of "what exactly is an organism?" Most people understand the concept of an organism in an animal, which has very carefully defined limits‐‐and most of it is usually visible as it moves around. However, much of a typical plant and most of a typical fungus is not visible to the naked eye. In particular with fungi, the limits of the individual are not clearly defined. The large question was "are these humongous fungi acting as single organisms?" It was well proven that the genetics of various parts of the humongous fungus organism are identical, but can, for example, one part of the organism communicate with other parts of the organism? Do they share physiology? If different parts are growing through different substrates, are they supplying other parts of the fungus with missing nutrients? Several articles began to appear in the scientific literature including Gould (1992) in which he spent a great deal of time discussing populations of asexually reproducing aphids. One letter to the editor by James Bullock of Oxford University (1992) pointed out some larger clones of plants, including an aspen clone (Populus tremuloides) covering 81 hectares and over 10,000 years old. At that time Bullock did not know about the larger A. ostoyae clones.

121 From Scientific American:

Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well…Ironically, the discovery of such huge fungi specimens rekindled the debate of what constitutes an individual organism. "It's one set of genetically identical cells that are in communication with one another that have a sort of common purpose or at least can coordinate themselves to do something," Volk explains.

Question: Are these fungi aware? Do they communicate?

On Awareness

Awareness is an associative instrument. It may be attuned.

Response may be defined as a transitive action, which may be indicative of, defined as, correlating to awareness, or sentience.

When a Japanese person bows to van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” the topological translation of his action presumes sentience. The Buddhist recognizes sentience as a quality not only present in humans. “I bow to all sentient beings, when I bow before you.” General respect for sentience is acknowledged throughout one’s interactions with another ______(sentient).

Science can observe response to stimulus. Response is a symptom of animation within an environment. Intention is a function of closed environments prone to adjudication of motivation. Animus is a directionally precipitated force of sentience in an open system.

Animus is rooted conceptually in the question of the initiation and perpetuation of motion (Greek). The precept of free will is the question for a requisite answer for what motivates action. Will is a mind‐centric definition of mobility.

The Epistemological and technical begin their divergence here. Animus becomes conjunctive to action. The issue of Free Will is introduced as the precursive element

122 in the assessment of action in the domain of morality and the adjudication of morality in laws, as in malicious intent. Critical discourse is one recent response, and many such dialectic responses are evidenced in the euro‐history of will.

Sentience describes motion not in terms of self‐propulsion, but in terms of general movement within which self‐propulsion is a component factor exhibited by entities that must move to survive. The adjudicant seeks to stop motion. The adjudicant is like a still camera, using light as a reason (means) to stop action.

Movement and sustainability are interwoven, as energy displaced and outcome. Energy can be displaced poorly or well for a good or bad outcome. The motion picture (film) camera is an analog. The action is stopped to assess the outcome. This is the analog for managed life (movement).

From these elements the foundation of dramatic narrative is erected. The dimensional component is encounter, is exchange, is transformation, is resurrection, is reformation, is interruption, is counterforce, and so on. The analog is digital animation with video and still elements. The action becomes data for creative reconfiguration, the analog for applied memory.

Speed and movement are energetic representations of matter. In art they are represented by the blur and other references to focus. Representation is partly a function of triangulation, so the POV or positional origin of observation determines the shape of matter “behind the retina,” its color, density, etc. In other words stasis and speed/movement are collaborative, co‐active or linked perceptual elements in a dimensional representation.

Light as Effect

Rembrandt, Picasso and Vermeer illustrate the value of light in compositional realism, within the dimensional array, or vignette. The array may be arranged physically or in the imagination. Sentience is not limited by the site of visualization, or the conditions, if memory can “fill in the blanks.” The negative space of composition is not a function of Epistemic concerns necessarily, although ample evidence has accrued for the use of art media for storytelling. The introduction of dimensional analysis has made push‐pull the ordering device of choice in social topology, because of its value as a converter of the closed system into the operationally open system.

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Light as an Orientation

Light and dark are not exclusive in terms of sentience.

A dimensional framework optimizes opacity and transparency as compositional components for layering of meaning. Time is a qualifier in such a structure, but without the burden of conclusion. Confusion of ideology is not a function of emotional response, as much as it is an encouragement for creative adaptation and motivation for innovation.

Life is not equal to light and dark equal to death as a rule, for example, in the dimensional topology. Sentience is present in both light and dark, both death and life, as are limitation and freedom (as song). Freedom is an analog for frequency. Reciprocity is an expression of freedom.

In the deepest cave there is life without light. In the darkest depths of the ocean there is enlightened life. In the brightest star there is dead star waiting to manifest. In the best dimensional or sentient composition, there is a potential for either + and + or + neither. When nothing is visible a scene suggests the sonic, a form of frequency. Sound does not exist in a vacuum. Sound bounces off of walls.

In the dimensional framework, then, the new medium is conceived when the conditions in the ectology mute the skillful means of the old medium. The sentience is not formed. It is transformed. The hierarchy is not prohibitively vertical. It is circular and derivative of the base sentient. Water is an analog for adaptation. Water fills the container. “Water finds its own level.”

The nature of light and darkness, the nature of sound, the nature of water, the nature of speed and movement, the nature of position: these are some of the elements to be studied for the improvement of dimensional art practice. The study of these elements also improves sentience.

Light and dark visit the Earth in cycles. Life and death visit the person (and other animated or vital forms) in cycles. Sentience is cyclic and more. The Ouroboros, to the Zen master’s ink circle, the Zero, the hoop, pi, and all in all: Plato understood this:

The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self‐ sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it

124 necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet. (Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett)

On Sentience and Dimensional Art

Sentience is dimensional. Dimensional art is sentient.

To know or perceive (sapere) is separated artificially from feeling (sentire). The topological issue is a reduction of cognition of as a limited linguistic formology meant to signify a phenomenal, and shared, sense awareness, reformatting the awareness into manageable and inconclusive elements (in the Western Tradition, at least). The operational consequence of arbitrary reduction as a motivation is the establishment over time of disciplines dedicated to the management of sentience, and the attempted conclusion or control by compartmentalization of the force that animates sentience.

Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron. Epistemic thought is without dimension. Art is dimensional. Epistemology is without art, and undimensional. Epistemology is unscience. Dimensional intelligence is sentience.

Equating sentience to emotion or feeling in the European or Western social topology is incorrect. The equation of reason as a preoccupation of man and emotion as a preoccupation of woman are incorrect propositions. Recognizing sentience in both man and woman is a correct proposition. If the fundamental dynamic of reproduction is incorrectly proposed, subsequent propositions will be sure to fail. Selection according to reason without respect for sentience will inevitably produce flawed inference.

First of all, east and west as defining terms on a sphere are absurd. They only work if one is smaller than the horizon.

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If the Earth is sentient, and you are sentient, you don’t have to go home. You’re already here.

Science can create or monitor conditions that produce effects. In that aspect, science is a design medium. Management is a design medium. Management and science are identical in their design function. Sentience designs itself, and is design, and is evidenced in design, and created.

Design is a functional medium. Sentience is an infusive element of excellent design. As this statement demonstrates, excellence is a corrolary of sentience.

Social topologies, especially at the tribal level, effect or modify the environment. Collectives are (capable of) sentient (sentience). Individuals are sentient. Modification of the environment can be a function of sentience.

Visual stimuli are like food. Visual stimuli are sustaining of sentience, depending on the diet.

Is your visual diet appetizing? Or do you consume junk food for the eyes?

If contemporary art is like the tip of the Samurai sword, in terms of sentience, what is ______(fill in the blank with a name, e.g., Catherine Opie) doing there? Contemporary art is not like the tip of the Samurai sword. A Samurai sword is sentient. Contemporary art is concerned with other things besides sentience. Dimensional art is like the tip of the Samurai sword.

On the Sentient World

In the sentient world, things tell the sentient being what to do with them.

In the sentient world, position is a function not of free will, but of sentience.

126 In the sentient world, being in the right place at the right time is impossible not to do.

In the sentient world, position is not endowed. Position is accepted, if it is correct.

In the sentient world, determining what is correct and what is incorrect is a form of play. Play is fun. Play is serious. Determining what is correct and what is incorrect is a matter of survival. Practicing survival can be fun, like play, and very serious. Play is dimensional. Games are sentient.

Through art and science, we determine what is correct and what is incorrect.

On Ownership and Sentience

Ownership is the enslavement of sentience.

To be alive is to be sentient. Sentience is life‐affirming, life‐revealing, life‐sustaining, life‐enhancing, life‐freeing and so on.

Ownership is a denial of life, and therefore sentience. Ownership is the restraint, constraint, and ultimately the destruction of life. In the sentient world, death is a facet of life. The rotting corpse gives life to the carrion‐feeders. When the carrion feeders are too well fed and too many, it is the sign of catastrophe.

Under the heading: Where were the Indians in all this?

From Law of Property Rights Protection (Laitos, 5.02):

The simplest definition of property is one which refers to a tangible thing. Such property typically has physical characteristics and dimensions. It would include both natural resources – land, water, trees, minerals, as well as developed resources – houses, cars, diamond rings.

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Property may also be present when the thing has no physical existence, but is instead an intangible legal interest.

And (5‐4):

Courts and commentators have assumed that the term “property” may have no less than three distinct meanings. First, property may refer to a thing, a parcel of land, a physical object, or an intangible interest. Second, the term “property” could refer to any relationship among persons with regard to the things of the external world. Under this second definition, property would consist of various legal rights in the thing (e.g., the right to possesss it, the right to security in it), or an entitlement to obtain a legal interest in the thing in the first place. Third, property could simply be equivalent to the ownership of a thing, which would carry with it the right to possess and use it to the exclusion of others.

From On Gold Mountain (See, pg. 27):

Back in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase had legally extended the boundary of the United States’ territories to the Rockies in the Northwest. But, boundary or no, trappers and hunters were already penetrating into the area beyond, while along the Pacific Coast, ships actively explored rivers and harbors, seeking places to pick up sea otter pelts to trade with China. The United States wasn’t the only country interested in this land so rich in natural resources. The British also wanted a share, as did the French, Russians, and Spanish. The idea of physical occupation had long been the basis for claims of sovereignty, and here that principle was at work again. Even as Britain’s Hudson Bay Company became increasingly entrenched, American settlers in the Willamette Valley in northwest Oregon argued for recognition by the United States government.

[Also ref.: Glencoe and the Indians (Hunter)]

The problem of ownership and seeing: the camera effect; a visual apparatus infected by the concept of private ownership, supported by the legal armature of copyright produces a movement to see‐to‐own. The aspect of exclusion is present. The aspect of synthesis is diminished, then the potency of engagement. Visual innovation comes to equal , or owning by seeing first or uniquely through a window. This is the process of automating vision. Automation is not sentience.

The homunculus is a necessary tool for those who imagine the possibility of life without sentience. Among these people, we find the owner.

I would like to share with the reader a wonderful and strange find. It is the short essay at the end of the Linda Goodman book, Love Signs. Goodman’s book brought astrology to the mainstream, and was a mainstay on any New Ager or aging hippie

128 bookshelf. The essay is called, “A Time to Embrace.” It is a defense of the meaning and value of human reproduction. After submerging in the material of this essay for months, I found it to be a lovely tonic.

From Wikipedia/eugenics/Japan (cite numbers not edited and cites not included):

Japan

In the early part of the Shōwa era, Japanese governments executed a eugenic policy to limit the birth of children with "inferior" traits, as well as aiming to protect the life and health of mothers.[73]

The Race Eugenic Protection Law was submitted from 1934 to 1938 to the Diet. After four amendments, this draft was promulgated as the National Eugenic Law in 1940 by the Konoe government [74]. According to the Eugenic Protection Law (1948), sterilization could be enforced on criminals "with genetic predisposition to commit crime", patients with genetic diseases such as total color‐blindness, hemophilia, albinism and ichthyosis, and mental affections such as schizophrenia, manic‐depressiveness and epilepsy. [75]. Mental illnesses were added in 1952.

The Leprosy Prevention laws of 1907, 1931 and 1953, the last one only repealed in 1996, permitted the segregation of patients in sanitarium where forced abortions and sterilization were common, even if the laws did not refer to it, and authorized punishmement of patients "disturbing peace" as most Japanese leprologists believed that the body constitution vulnerable to the disease was inheritable. [76] There were a few Japanese leprologists such as Noburo Ogasawara who argued against the "isolation‐sterilization policy" but he was denounced as a traitor to the nation at 15th conference of the Japanese Association of Leprology in 1941. [77]

Center staff also attempted to discourage marriage between Japanese women and Korean men who had been recruited from the peninsula as laborers following its annexation by Japan in 1910. In 1942, a survey report argued that "the Korean laborers brought to Japan, where they have established permanent residency, are of the lower classes and therefore of inferior constitution...By fathering children with Japanese women, these men could lower the caliber of the Yamato minzoku." [78]

One of the last eugenic measures of the Shōwa regime was taken by the Higashikuni government. On 19 August 1945, the Home Ministry ordered local government offices to establish a prostitution service for allied soldiers to preserve the "purity" of the "Japanese race". The official declaration stated, "Through the sacrifice of thousands of "Okichis" of the Shōwa era, we shall

129 construct a dike to hold back the mad frenzy of the occupation troops and cultivate and preserve the purity of our race long into the future...." [79]

[also ref: Fitzpatrick (2001)]:

Abstract

The new genetics is of undoubted importance to the future of welfare reform, but if this influence is not to be dominated by Right‐wing values and prescriptions then some alternative conceptions need to be in place. This article begins by criticising the recent intervention by Charles Murray, insisting that Murray opens the door to a laissez faire eugenics. It then proceeds to outline a theory of regulated eugenics, justifying use of the concept ‘eugenics’ along the way, in terms of three elements: a multi‐dimensional conception of human nature, differential egalitarianism and the precautionary principle. It then elaborates upon these ideas, and contrasts them with laissez faire eugenics, in a discussion of three areas of direct and immediate relevance to social policy: genetic screening, gene therapy and reproduction.

The fertility curve

In 1979, Drucker discusses the Japanese “learning curve.” He should have been focusing on the country’s fertility curve, which has plummeted since World War 2. Today, Japan has the most rapid and serious ageing problem in the world, due to declining fertility rates, combined with rising longevity (Peng). “There is also the concern that a higher proportion of older workers may result in a loss of vitality for the corporation and nation.” Japan incorporated is demographically coming to resemble the Samurai but little.

Ahimsa = (Sanskrit); to do no harm

Two Treatises of Government (Locke)

Let it be, that they exposed them; add to it, if you please, for this still greater power, that they begat them for their tables, to fat and eat them: if this proves a right to do so, we may, by the same argument, justify adultery, incest and sodomy, for there are examples of these too, both ancient and modern; sins, which I suppose have their principal aggravation from this, that they cross the main intention of nature, which willeth the increase of mankind, and the continuation of the species in the highest perfection, and the distinction of families, with the security of the marriage‐bed, as necessary thereunto.

>

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To this purpose, I think it may not be amiss, to set down what I take to be political power; that the power of a magistrate over a subject may be distinguished from that of a father over children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave. All which distinct powers happening sometimes together in the same man, if he be considered under these different relations, it may help us to distinguish these powers one from another, and shew the difference betwixt a ruler of a commonwealth, a father of a family, and a captain of a gallery.

Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.

>

A state of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, on one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty. (Emphasis, PJM)

Note: The narrative indicates the conflict engendered by the Epistemology of the author. The blatant contradiction of freedom within the set is not remedied with the dominion over the set by “lord and master of them all,” a problem further obfuscated divine and mundane only by capitalization.

On creativity, creative destruction and global birth trends (Questions or Rhetoric)

Does the success of globalism inhibit or otherwise diminish fertility? How?

Abortion and eugenics: are these identical terms, or rather domains in the same field? Do they serve similar functions?

In the sentient world, there is no need for globalism. Globalism is the ambition of those who would own the world. Management is the control of owned things, people, and land. Global management is unnecessary in the sentient world. The sentient world manages itself.

Life does not need managing, when it is sentient. A dimensional painter doesn’t manage a painting, while he’s making it. He’s too engaged in the relationship to resort to control.

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Human life is sentience held in trust.

The tonic for ownership is the Trust.

Irony is the expression of the Episteme’s hatred of play. It is ironic that Robber Baron monopolies were called Trusts.

Management is function of fear of risk. The corporation is a fabrication to protect fearful people from risk. A dimensional painter seems fearless of risk, although that is not correct. Fear is natural, a normal part of life. The dimensional painter is busy being sentient while he’s painting. He doesn’t have time to be afraid. This is true of any sentient doing anything worthwhile.

What is a person who has all material needs met a thousand times a thousand times over afraid of? Such a person is only afraid, if his needs are met by the reaping of measure from owned things (people, land). Then he will be afraid someone else will take away from him the things he owns. Ownership is an effort to replace sentience with comfort or power. Sentience is comfort and power (and + or + either + neither). Sentience does not need ownership to exist. Ownership seeks to own what it cannot (or should not). An owner buys a painting to fill the void created by his abandonment or abuse of sentience.

The analog for selling of an owned thing to another owner is prostituting a person.

“Enough” is a form of sentient realization, especially if “enough” is correct. How one finishes a painting is an expression of sentience. For a sentient painter, finishing a painting is like sharing a friend’s death. Knowing where to place a painting’s elements is like setting the table for a dinner with a loved one.

The sentient answer for “no” is time.

132 “No” is the cause of irony.

On the American Problems of Democracy

All America has to do to clean up her Democracy is replace the system of laws and practices upholding ownership, with a system of laws and practices upholding trusts. Stewardship is the answer for ownership.

On the second point: A sentient America will only permit organizations that enhance and protect sentience.

In both cases, the basic structures, like all structures are permeable and cyclic. The sentience form will modify to adhere to current conditions. This is a symptom of sentience.

On the question of time and current conditions: the most beautiful words in sentient language are (in translation) in perpetuity.

Notes on various elements in the Japanese social topology, and more profiling

Tracing the history of eugenics in Japan is relatively easy, given that more than most societies that have embraced the practice, Japan collectively perhaps did not perceive eugenics as sufficiently antithetical in its topological composition.

In his essay, we see Drucker transposing art on social ecology and the inverse. Japan and Japanese art are portrayed by comparison, in duotones. The author ventures critical deductions on issues aesthetic, to get at social, economic and political meaning. He frames the country’s personality while disclosing to the reader the appeal the work has for him. What might we learn from parsing the two subjects?

In 1979, could Drucker have envisioned the “Lost Decade” of Japan, or the societal disintegration that would attend the productivity boom and rise to power of the financial sector? Could Drucker have envisioned the youth culture of Japan, the anime, the manga, the pervasive electronic society predicted by (Drucker’s friend) Marshall McLuhan and dismissed by Drucker in his essay with a cryptic dualism that has been proved incorrect? The Japanese obsession with electronic gadgets supports McLuhan, not Drucker, but also points to the globalization of wired cultural diversity. Yet, Japan has not produced a culturally emblematic footprint in the binary world. What has texting to do with essence, other than the perceptual and conceptual meeting in the context of a single, immediate GUI housed in a neon pink shell in the blurred by speed hands of a 13 year‐old Japanese girl? The content is not distinctively Japanese. We have no Japanese corollary to Tom Cruise or James

133 Dean. What makes the Japanese texter different from the consumer‐girl doing the same thing in Iowa, especially if both are raving about the same pop idol’s new hit, which both saw simultaneously, the second it hit the web? What will become of the Japanese identity when productivity and manufacturing costs push the wealth to China? What has McDonald’s done to Japan that China could not? Drucker does not see through his window to tell us about these things.

The subject of a review of Drucker’s catalog essay for Song of the Brush, Japanese Paintings from the Sanso Collection (Rosenfeld, 1979), then, should not be the Japan he envisioned in 1979, necessarily, or the art he critiqued. Art criticism is a mediation of modern art for viewers possessing some measure of freedom to value the work on that basis. The artist whose work is described in Peter’s essay was in no position to respond freely to his environment, to see it and represent it as he see saw fit, than I am to comment on the technical codes he needed and used to run the gauntlet of state control. Not even the shogun was above the protocols of control when these works were produced. It might be better to examine the function of art in a society exhibiting bottom‐to‐top controls, and why such art appealed to the management guru Peter Drucker, and what might have compelled him to defend such art through the mischaracterization of superimposed and selective social ecologies or unrepresented personal affinities.

An explanation of methodology

Peter Drucker’s essay on Japanese art is not considered to be of any particular importance to the field of art criticism. However, like any single element in a dimensional order, “A View of Japan through Japanese Art” can be used to extrapolate important realities about the order and the things in it, or of it.

Until now, no one has suggested that the oeuvre of Peter Drucker could or should be assessed through the lens of this brief and obscure piece of writing. In a dimensional framework, however, nearly any element in a data set can serve as a point of departure for a thorough and referential examination of the characteristics of a thing.

Dimensional mapping is a function of topology. It is multi‐directional and as such relies on a combining of points for reference and perspective. Starting in one place is as valid as starting in another, for all of the points occur in the same field (or environment, or reality, etc.). One starts where one is.

As indicated in the introduction, my material start point was Joseph Maciariello’s opening lecture for The Drucker Difference course, not the Drucker essay on Japanese art. Prior to that I had no direct knowledge of Drucker’s work. What I did not realize then, however, was how pervasive was my environmental exposure to

134 Drucker, for good or ill. I have discussed secondary effects of Drucker elsewhere, and will likely continue to do so, since the effects to which I refer pertain.

On Vision and freedom

We have seen how dimensional realism is essential for social sustainability. We have looked at how dimensionally realistic art functions in furtherance of human survival. Human survival is a condition of seeing, we learned, and art is a vital mechanism for sharing individual vision with the collective. Now we must examine the mechanisms by which shared vision is controlled and to what ends and by what means.

Peter Drucker begins his essay on Japanese art thus: “Japan, as everybody knows, is a country of rigid rules and of individual subordination to a collective will.” In all such monopolies, which we will discuss in terms of Epistemological power over Technical seeing, the function of art is identical: it reinforces the power structure.

Whatever Asian art may have been prior to its exposure to Western influence, by the time Peter Drucker grew interested in Asian (specifically Japanese) art and culture, the Epistemological had attained dominance over the social mechanisms of vision, whatever Drucker’s contentions to the contrary. Japan, after losing the Second World War, facing atomic obliteration, accepted acculturation to the West. The artist of Japan now must tell that story. Elsewhere, I discuss this, using Murakami, Japan’s contemporary art star as the prime example.

If we are to choose survival collectively, we must understand as best we can of what such a choice consists. Building on the conclusions above, we now move on to more complex issues of vision and freedom.

The Imperfect and the Epistemological

The Episteme defines reality as imperfect in order to justify the exertion of control over it.

The Epistemological and the Seer

The Episteme exerts control over the artist (the functional seer) in order to enforce the Epistemological definition of reality as imperfect, rather than dimensional.

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The Epistemological and Dimensional Realism

The Episteme attacks or rejects dimensional realism in order to maintain control over the collective, to preserve the domination of the collective by the Epistemological.

The Epistemological and Content

The Episteme controls the interpretation of what is seen by managing content.

Content in art is dimensional representation (reality).

Narrative is waveform representation (dramatic rise and fall). Narrative is a form of illustration. It is the result of sampling movement (4 Dimension) in time space. Waveform movement is a specific form of movement. Waveform improves sustainability across time space (distance).

Epistemological narrative reinforces the Episteme’s claims to power. Usually, this means that the narrative supports the perception that the environment is imperfect.

The Episteme claims that imperfection can be managed.

Epistemological narrative encourages productivity.

Epistemological productivity is the maximization of unsustainable action to the benefit of the controller. Productivity of this kind results from a narrative that is an illusory representation of 4D realism, minus waste.

Epistemological content is coded and exclusive.

The Epistemological and Power

The Episteme desires power over the environment and the collective in order to derive and consolidate individual benefits from the environment and the collective.

The Epistemological and Waste

The Epistemological is inherently 3 Dimensional. When the 3 Dimensional action is not directed by 4 Dimensional realism, the action 3D action will not be sustainable.

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Unsustainable action is inherently wasteful.

The Episteme sees accurately (E1).

The Episteme evaluates or interprets accurately (E2).

The Episteme desires what he sees for himself, and uses the mind to control what he sees and desires.

An Epistemological Poem from seeing accurately, including: the survival value of things in reality, understanding survival value relationships between and among things, inventing mechanisms that produce survival value from things.

How?

1. The Episteme monopolizes vision by controlling seeing primarily from the environment (reality) and, secondarily from the productivity of the collective in relation to the environment.

Seeing and Mediation

The first mediation is the artist’s hand. The eye and hand are both directly connected to the mind of a healthy person. The senses of the person connect him to his environment (reality). In art, the first interpretation is enacted by the hand of the artist.

Another artist job is choosing a good thing to look at, something worthy of sharing (value and meaning).

Distinguishing between seeing and interpreting is important for the collective. Art is a middle step between seeing and interpreting.

A person who believes that a magical force guides his vision is called a visionary, especially if others become convinced that the visionary’s belief is well founded.

In the case of the visionary, it is as if the world assembles itself to make sure that the visionary sees the truth. It is not hard to illustrate the statement that a thin line separates the visionary from the madman. Both combine seeing and interpreting into one dimension of experience.

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On the Senses and Regeneration

The conceptual is a secondary matter. Broadly, conceiving is not limited to a sensory reception of an exterior thing. Conceiving entails one’s creating something, related to one’s experience of another thing. The conceptual is generative. It would be optimistic to claim that perceiving is regenerative, but a person who has been deprived of one of his senses might argue differently.

To distinguish as Peter Drucker does, between the perceptual and conceptual as a cultural description for a nation or race of people is ridiculous. All humans with senses perceive. All humans with senses and operational minds conceive. Perception and conception are fundamental to human survival.

In its most basic equation, the process goes like this: A man and woman see each other. They like what they see, get together and make a baby. The human race is regenerated.

On Ecology and Art

The interpretation of the seen thing belongs to separate orders. Drucker’s essay purports to reduce art to an explicatory role in his social ecology. This is one reason his analysis fails. Art refuses such calumny. Perhaps that is too strong a word. Ostensibly, “A View of Japan through Japanese Art” was written to celebrate the exhibit in question.

Drucker deduces Japan’s social ecology from the art in the collection. He claimed to have been more interested in people than numbers. Peter Drucker apparently did not realize that ecology, ownership and art have nothing whatever to do with each other.

Art and society do have something to do with each other, however. What is defined as art is a function of social monopoly, historically. At least, this was true until free speech was conceived.

Peter describes Japan as a “country of rigid rules and of individual subordination to a collective will.” In The Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, in the chapter entitled “Censorship Versus Freedom of Expression in the Arts,” (Tun‐jen Chiang and Richard S. Posner, page 317) we learn this:

The Tokugawa shogunate, which came to power in 1603, enacted strict censorship laws and exercised considerable control over the production of

138 both woodblock prints and printed books. In Japan during this period the government’s emphasis on education led to a dramatic rise in literacy, but woodblock prints remained a powerful instrument of mass communication that was believed to require rigid state control.

The Neo‐Confucian ideology of the shogunate insisted upon a plain, strictly moral lifestyle. Though individual members of the ruling warrior class failed to satisfy these lofty aspirations, it was the self‐indulgent consumption of the merchant class, whose economic power was steadily growing, that was seen as a threat to the established order. Tokugawa regulation of woodblock prints kept a watchful eye for political subversion and also censured sexual impropriety and excessive luxury.

What ought to be clear to any student of history is that censorship does not end with the censor’s time in power. The longevity of censorship is remarkable. That Peter Drucker’s first important literary works were censored by the Nazis was for him a source of pride. This is undoubtedly true, in part, because Drucker survived the Nazis, and his ideas subsequently flourished. Peter and his ideology were embraced by the world’s powerful Democracies, and given asylum in the free speech arenas that likewise survived European Fascism, and the Emperor of Japan’s global ambitions.

On Luck, Fortune, Chance and Sentience

In the sentient world, luck, fortune and chance are moot. Sentience is the medium of choice. Color is the expression of choice. When a sentient painter chooses a color, he is demonstrating the nature of choice. Harmonious color is an expression of a phase of sentience. Ugly color is another. Color in commercial design is a function of management.

Jackson Pollack made paintings representing a universe of choices. After he made those paintings, Americans became the best in the world at making millions of colors from which artists (and everyone else) could choose. Jackson made enhanced the sentient world.

Taking the money one owns to the casino and wagering it on chance is the opposite of making a drip painting in New York in the late 40s of the 20th Century.

A Note (of potential interest to historical re­designers)

139 Interpretation of perception and representation of it are critical and creative responses to the seen thing. In a social setting, obscenity is a function of the command and control structure of the societal monopoly.

Why were the Nazis and the Tokugawa shogunate compelled to stifle specific representations, identifying them as offensive? Both political bodies were dynamic products of their respective societies. Both managed to rule the preponderant majority of their subjects and produce significant cultural legacies.

The Tokugawa dominated Japan for 250 years, until the arrival of colonial European powers. The profile of modern Japan does not exist without the Edo period. Japan’s actions as a warring nation in the 20th Century were predicated by the Tokugawa shogunate. As for the Nazis, although their reign was relatively brief, their impact on the world has been pervasive and profound.

Interestingly, to admire the Nazis sense of style and social achievements is considered obscene. To admire the Tokugawa shogunate, their elaborate fashions and armature, architecture and crafts, their “polarities,” as Drucker characterizes them, is fodder for a polite catalog essay.

An objective viewer might have difficulty discerning the substantive differences between the cultures of Nazi Germany and Edo Japan, the monumental and severe, but heroic, architectures, the preponderantly black and stylish uniforms, the flair for organizationally inspirational graphics, and so on. An objective observer might also ascertain a polar disparity between modern German and Japanese cultures: the Germans have to a great degree disappeared the evidence of their Nazi past; in Japan, the Japanese embrace their Edo past. Drucker’s position spanning both histories chooses to focus aesthetically on an interpretation and representation of the Japanese, with selective fondness. A dimensional comparison of the two cultures would have been nice.

“Yes” is the cause of sarcasm, employed while a sentient speaker is waiting for enough time to pass to change “no” to “yes.” Sometimes sarcasm is wrong, usually when the speaker is smaller than the horizon.

On Sentience and Soul

They are not the same thing. Sentience doesn’t need to be saved. Likewise, the sentient world does not need to be saved. This is only difficult for an Episteme to comprehend.

140

On Drucker, Prediction, the Dimensional, Reality and Productivity Studies

Peter Drucker is famous for his advances in business management. He coined “social ecology” to describe his medium, and described himself as a conservative, Christian anarchist. Drucker attributed his much‐celebrated ability to predict economic trends in terms of vision.

“I don’t predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”

The object of sight in Drucker’s cryptic one‐liner, one must assume is Reality. The philosophical arguments, such as Descartes’, that thinking is the only true measure of self realization, abrogating the senses as a measure of the real or not real, must be set aside. Drucker is describing a complex form of Epistemological analysis, not the action of peering out a window in his Claremont home.

Sentient vision does not require a window, or a house, owned by the viewer. It only requires a position.

Reality is dimensional.

The dimensional in economics of the early 20th Century focused on manufacturing productivity (Taylor, 1911). In the late 20th Century, the dimensional in economics focused on the Internet. Now, the dimensional in economics focuses on management of organizational behavior. Meanwhile, presently, the sentient world is blurring past into the future. McLuhan was more right than Drucker, but that had nothing to do with electronics.

Artwork to soothe the outraged citizenry

In his essay on Japanese art and Japan, Peter Drucker emphasizes the tensions in that society between the individual and the collective. Seeing is a function of the individual. Managing the responses to reality, perceived by the individual through his senses, is a function of the collective. The social monopoly exerts its power to direct and shape collective perceptions.

Perspective is a function of three dimensions, at least. A three‐dimensional object yields a different experience, a different view, depending on where one stands in relation to it. A sculptor uses this knowledge to his advantage. So does an architect, but an architect is not a sculptor. Maya Lin is not a dimensional artist, no matter what the ruling monopoly might assert on her behalf, no matter what she might think about it, no matter that she received an art show at the Corcoran, one of America’s premier galleries.

141 The artworks she has commissioned to be fabricated do function as art to a degree. They may be enjoyable and tasteful, even conceptually compelling. Her famous Vietnam memorial is a good example. It is a well‐designed and conceived list. Maya Lin’s admirers argue that the tears shed by veterans and families at the Wall, as it is called, prove the artistic merit of the work. This is untrue. The grief demonstrated by the people who have made pilgrimage to Washington to mourn their soldier dead has nothing to do with Maya Lin’s design.

Still, people like them for the sentience they do not yet manifest, but which they infer in their lack. It is a blunt tip.

I do not mean to suggest the absence of value in the monument or the experience of those whom it touches. I do not mean to denigrate Maya Lin’s personal prowess or achievements. I do mean to restrict art in terms of free speech.

No doubt this example is as complex a problem as can be offered. It explicitly involves many of the elements associated with free speech and art: text; societal expectations; precedents; racism; militarism; public space; traditional versus new aesthetics; and so on. Many initially vehemently opposed its installation in the nation’s capitol.

The solution is easy to see when the problem is correctly identified. This is a truth that Drucker appreciated, especially when the problem was posed in a closed system. Solutions in closed systems are real only in math, however. Solutions in real closed systems are a function of ownership, of enslavement and not art.

Anything too big to fail is Epistemology. Epistemological art is a zombie, by a zombie‐maker, for a zombie‐viewer. When a sentient encounters such art, he will use it as an opportunity to play “correct” or “incorrect,” pass it by, or do the sentient what‐is‐to‐do. If it’s time for a sentient to cry at the wall, he will.

Pain is a fact of normal human life. Easy is not. A soft thing with nerve senses that identify pain, surrounded by hard and sharp objects, etc., will come to experience pain, most likely. A sentient person will learn to move with care, a game that is fun.

Question: What if you and your playmates get so good at dodging hard and sharp stuff, when you’re walking, that, in order to make the game more fun, you start throwing hard and sharp things at one another? What if pain makes you forget it was a game to begin with? What if you are children, and your mother is not close by to remind you that you are playing a game with friends?

What if you are a robot and it doesn’t hurt? (What a dumb idea!)

142

When I was a child, I threw rocks and hit other kids. Sometimes they hit me with rocks. Sometimes my mother stopped our play. Sometimes she wasn’t there. Once, a bunch of us kids had a rock‐throwing war in parallel trenches cut for plumbing in what would be the front yard of a home. I remember seeing that brick arcing through the air. I don’t why I didn’t manage to get out of the way. It hit me in the head. I bled profusely. The other kids checked it out and told me the game was over for me that day, that I should go home. I didn’t cry the whole time they inspected the injury, very seriously. Not one of them was over the age of twelve. I think I may have been a little bit in shock. I was shaking and hyperventilating a bit. On the subject of bawling, though, I didn’t even cry as I woozily walked the two or three miles home, wiping the blood on my shirtsleeve until the sleeve was soaked through, a pretty red. When I finally stumbled up the driveway, my mom opened the door, and I burst into tears. At the time, somewhere in the back of my head I wondered why I couldn’t stop crying. I’d walked all that way without crying. Why should I start now and not be able to stop, as my mom held me. I didn’t wonder about qualia. I didn’t wonder why the knock on my head didn’t make green blood pour forth from the wound. I didn’t know why that color, which changes as it dries, is called “red,” or how I was able to “get” that.

The blood on my sleeve was a “brick red.”

Peter Drucker admires Japan’s social balance between the individual’s capacity for “pure enjoyment,” and the “fierce ruthlessness” with which Japan’s corporations battle for supremacy. One wonders what Drucker would have written on the subject, if he had been composing the essay in the 1990’s, while Japan wallowed in economic stagnation, or this year, as the nation struggles to survive the global financial crisis. I recently watched a CNN human‐interest piece on a former art dealer, now janitor, who is struggling to rebuild his life, after losing everything to the market’s downturn. The fierce ruthlessness of the corporations robbed him of his pure enjoyments – at least this was the gist of the piece.

The incredible selectivity of Peter, to assert that diversity was a feature of the Edo era, in conjunction with individualism, defies all estimates of freedom. Only one who believes that freedom is a function of organization could so interpret the reality of individual life under the shogunate’s rule. A “flamboyant diversity,” he calls it. “There is nothing comparable in other cultures,” he claims. There is more diversity in a second‐rate American collegiate art program than existed at any point in the reign of the Tokugawa. The difference is free speech.

143 As for sentience, that may be a different story. It could be argued correctly that a Japanese swordmaker is more sentient in his practice of crafting swords than American art students are at making commercially viable art.

Maya Lin is the cute and cuddly face of today’s Organization Man. She is the epitome of Drucker’s Knowledge Worker. She is a product of the same school that produced George W. Bush, an admirer of Drucker. She is not an artist. Her artwork is derivative in every respect. It mimics the innovations of others, and is innovative only in its obfuscation of correlation to those artworks that have evidenced perception of the highest quality. Its precision is a function of the mechanical, not the humane. The conceptual framework Lin sets forth to defend her output’s artistic integrity and purport her own perceptual strengths, as they are invested in her products, are the stuff of political correctness and the spiritual realm’s lowest common denominators.

It is doubtful, however, that Peter Drucker would have found much in Maya Lin’s work to admire, based on his essay. He preferred to interpret a tradition about which those in his immediate community would know little, and therefore could not dispute Drucker’s interpretations readily. What a man loves is what he loves or hates, not the collective. In a sentient world, the individual and collective both love the same thing: sentience.

Sentience has no parts. It has no more or less.

How an Artist Learned (with Epistemological Certainty) that He Was an Artist in the “Ownership Society”

One night, when I was a student at Notre Dame, my friend Pat and I decided to walk from my apartment a block to the bars for $.25 shots. We drank about $20 worth over the next several hours. The bar managers decided it was time for us to go home.

We walked away from the bar and down the wrong street, if our objective was to reach my apartment. In our drunken state, apparently, we crashed through hedges, etc., until coming to rest in someone’s front yard. I don’t really recall what we talked about, loudly. I do vaguely remember informing Pat that I needed to rest a little.

The next thing I remember, my eyes glimpsing a gorgeous splash of crimson on a fantastic speckled silver background under artificial illumination. I recall vividly thinking, “That is beautiful!” Those weren’t the exact thought‐words, but that’s the gist.

144 So as not to get too poetic about the scene, I’ll disclose to the reader the reality of the circumstances, leaving out some secondary narrative details. The South Bend police had opened my head with a flashlight, my hands were shackled behind my back, and they were smashing my face into the hood of their patrol car. One or both of them was/were shouting at me (obscenities, orders). It was all a‐blur.

I know this sounds weird to the non‐artist, but all I was interested in that moment was getting another view of that crimson swoosh on silver. I’m not sure when or if I associated that red with my blood, or that silver with the cops’ car.

I just knew that only an artist could respond to a visual stimulus with such myopia. I couldn’t wait to get back to the studio to paint.

Those two city patrolmen were good art teachers that night. Maybe, they were the best I’ve ever had. I guess it depends on your criteria. Intent, too: I don’t imagine they gave a rat’s ass about my evolution as a dimensional artist, that night. I don’t guess their methods would fall into the art teacher best practices category. I suppose it all boils down to being in the right place at the right time to get a good lesson. “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” as they say.

On Movements and Deserving

“Abuse” is how Peter Drucker characterizes a comparison on merits of Japanese painting with Western modern art. From Drucker’s perspective, Japanese art outperforms the contemporary Western mode at every turn. The comparison in Drucker’s essay is problematic for many reasons.

First among them is the fact that the term “modern” is not correct. Neither is the term “contemporary.” All art at its conception is contemporary. Because modern and contemporary are essentially interchangeable terms, the structure of Drucker’s advocacy is nearly meaningless. What Peter’s argument reveals is not is an aesthetic evaluation of his subject, a viable comparison. Drucker’s subject is his own Epistemology.

The analog in movies is John Wayne’s acting method. The analog for television is reality TV.

As for Japanese art’s relative advancement, compared to Western art, Peter Drucker elects to omit one of the most glaring failures of the former. Namely, until the second half of the 20th Century, Japanese artists for the most part did not have the representational tools to convey motion with any plastic accuracy. The stylistic medium was almost entirely two‐dimensional.

145 Only after exposure to modern visual art and cinema did the Japanese artist embrace the potential inherent in the Western form to convey that fundamental facet of human experience. Motion, and its representational partnership with time, was in great measure outside the skillset of the Japanese artist (although certainly not beyond his imagination or outside his experience).

Once he was afforded the freedom to explore the paint medium with time and motion as viable, if not essential, characteristics of representation, as a result of cultural exchange with the modern West, the Japanese artist progressed with astounding speed and facility.

Explosive artistic output is likely whenever a society denies perception articulation through cultural media over a period of time, and then for whatever reason, the suppressive force loses its power to contain expression. Enabling sentience yields bountiful productivity, every time.

The Japanese artist had been forced to work within extreme stylistic constraints by a cultural monopoly. One of those restraints reduced movement to a mechanism of the imagination. For the Japanese the representation of movement entailed a secondary experience, presumably an interactive game of viewer participation. The faculties of memory and imagination were employed to animate the artist’s intent and the painting’s narrative.

(Fortunately, given the layered and faceted narrative, sentience was alive and well and living in Japan throughout the era in question. In fact, sentience was alive and well and living in Japan throughout all the eras, and it always will be, even if the word “Japan” becomes extinct. Who’s to say whether what used to be Japan ‐ as the oceans rise up to consume the island, as the polar ice melts to reveal a great burgeoning continent, as the Samurai swords disappear into the floor of the sea ‐ that the sentience invested into those lovely and deadly blades, commingling with the sentience extant in the raw metals and the wood of the blazes that transformed them into agents of graceful violence, won’t still be extant under the rolling waves?)

So, is the stylized frog that Drucker praises a function of repetition, the representation of the frog in the painter’s mind, or do frogs really look like that in Japan? The sentient critic wonders all these things simultaneously.

One genre not mentioned, which I find particularly demonstrative of the argument, is the procession scroll painting. A witness to a Royal or ceremonial Japanese procession would find that a scroll painting memorializing that occurrence would activate his memory of it. Or, if the viewer had been absent for the specific procession represented, he would be able to imagine more or less the substance of it from the pictorial clues provided by the artwork. He might recognize this or that notable person, one supposes in much the same way one assembles a mind movie from a good newspaper story chronicling any social ritual involving celebrities.

146 The medium of Japanese representation, over centuries, as in any repressed form, eventually evolved into a highly coded system of visual and interpretational constructs for conveying subtle description. Of course, the more familiar the viewer with these codes, the more meaning the artwork conveys. The medium depicts the opacity of the brutally ordered society, as much as it functions artistically. Visual literacy with respect to stimulative codes is essential for proper viewing of Japanese art.

An analog would be Pong.

Drucker’s assertions about artist individuality expressed in Japanese art therefore are superficial. To focus on the relative freedoms afforded children in Japanese society, prior to their inculcation into the historic structural repressions of Japanese adult life, is a romantic trope.

For Drucker to pretend to interpret the feelings of a Japanese artist during the rendering of a highly coded and stylized drawing session that occurred in the distant past is akin to George W. Bush looking deeply into the eyes of Vladimir Putin and suggesting the former could trust the latter, because Bush could magically see into the soul of Putin and discern his trustworthiness in matters of state. To connect the imagined feelings of a Japanese painter to an individual articulation of Beauty is equally problematic.

The codes for Beauty in Japanese art are as rigid and repressive as the codes of dress and behavior for Japanese Geisha and court women. It is therefore especially interesting to read Drucker’s commentary on the various roles women play in modern Japanese society.

Certainly, the cultural mashup (to use the dimensional term) that has caused significant upheaval in Japan’s domestic stability, since the nation’s exposure to Western ways, is nowhere more complex and difficult as it is in the definition of gender. It cannot be argued that contemporary Japanese art, such as it is, does not reflect this social upheaval.

Likewise, codes for beauty, whether natural or feminine, in terms of landscape or societal order, are in a state of radical displacement and reformation. No conclusion can yet be drawn about the future of the society in these areas, other than to say by accepting the chaos of gender identity into the turgid warrior codes of Japanese self‐ regulation the Japanese have invited a tremendously destabilizing element into their societal form.

Artistic representation of Japanese women, as emblematic of a shared notion of Beauty in the democratic idiom is obviously not similar to the same subject drawn through the lens of the coded forms of the shogunate. Murakami, as the nation’s prime mover in the art world, depicts women as hyper‐sexualized adolescent super heroes. It is worth recalling that despite the censorship prevalent during the

147 Tokugawa reign, a vibrant and diverse economy in erotic art existed in Japan. Drucker nowhere acknowledges this.

In short, to suggest that the requirements placed on art in Japanese society are reducible to polarities, tensions or any other dualistic diagnostic is absurd. Perhaps at the height of shogunate power a point existed when an artist would be choosing life or death when he chose a subject or misapplied a coded suggestion. Today, however, Japanese social topology is not only perceptual and conceptual, it is dimensional.

As Drucker wrote, “Society and community must be multi‐dimensional; they are environments.” Art today is likewise multi‐dimensional, especially in a democratic society. Japanese art is not exceptional in this respect. How the art form arrived at this juncture is very much worthy of consideration, and the art of Japan’s past is certainly worth preserving, as a practical matter. It provides the best content for the art of today.

At seventeen I assembled my first dimensional collective project. “The Pot Luck Players” was theater‐ and music‐centric, or in the current vernacular, performative. We sang songs, scripted short plays and interspersed the lot with comedic interludes and caricatures. The hometown crowds loved it. Our first show was in a Catholic Church basement, for a raucous packed house. What a blast! Our second was in the Women’s Club, across from the building where I was born (once a hospital, now a bank, on the perimeter of what was then Van Meter stadium, where I played football in junior high (at Park Junior High), diagonally adjacent to “the dust bowl,” the glass laden sandlot softball “field” where we practiced or gridiron prowess, at the end of the street of the second part of my childhood. My dad took lots of pictures.

Preservation is a key to sustainability. Unlike Europe’s inclinations to destroy its past every time it reinvents its future, Japan’s relations with its past are relatively healthy, if selective. For instance, Japan insists that the United States apologize for the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but finds it tremendously difficult to acknowledge the horrors Japan inflicted during its occupation of China.

A proper dimensional inquiry would explore how this social imaging issue is echoed in the society’s art. Drucker suggests that an organizational role is one‐dimensional, and that the organization is a tool for the multi‐dimensional society. Sentient art is not organizational. Any society that forces art and artists to be tools of the society is a brutal, repressive society, and it gets the artists it deserves.

148

My first solo art endeavor was “Funkshunart.” My friend Anna Nekoranec turned me on to Vogart fabric pens, and I used them to make images on tee shirts (which she showed me how to do). Anna is now a successful venture capitalist and author. Beckley, West Virginia never ceases to amaze me. I owe so much to the people I grew up with!

Long story short (leaving out all the central details of the Funkshunart narrative for another time and text), the biggest collector of Funkshunart gear and whatnot is my college pal Jim Keyes. The Keyes family holds the largest collection of my early work. I gave them many works – in the dozens or hundreds – for safekeeping, in the eventuality of my, what seemed at the time to be, almost certain early demise. Three of the six Keyes boys and Scott O’Grady of Cohasset comprised the band Par 3, and they were my crew. I was the artist contingent. The boys provided me my first major commission, a 24’ x 8’ drop cloth of a canvas, which I painted for their use as a stage backdrop. We did some epic productions, which included Funkshunart clothes, lighting, stage paintings, a guitar, and so on, for Khyber Pass and other NYC and Philly venues.

Anyway, I was catching up with JP the night before last, and he told me a story about Paul, his dad. Mister Keyes was transporting an oilrig across African terrain with the aid of local nomadic people. A blind elephant wandered into the worker’s village. According to Jim, the Africans beat it to death with rocks and sticks, then spent the next three days consuming the elephant in its entirety. Paul’s rig I guess just sat there, until the pachyderm was history.

It turns out that Anna and JP’s parents live in the same little town. Small world!

More about Murakami and the Vagaries of Contemporary Art + Artists (Some comparative thoughts, or a fishing expedition); Weirdness in the Marketplace; Trying on Dung

One wonders what Drucker would have thought of Murakami’s exhibit at MoCA entitled, “©.”1 A long quote from a New York Times portrait of Takashi Murakami touches on many of the issues described above and below, with respect to Drucker and his misreading of Japanese art:

Anime and manga are inexact copies of Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and other American cartoon characters, modified for Japanese taste and (at the time they were developed) for the limitations of Japanese technology. The Japanese have always had a genius for these adaptations. Murakami is a great admirer of the Kano School, a dynasty of painters who catered to the shoguns

1 I addressed this in an essay for the Drucker Difference.

149 for almost four centuries by taking the principles of Chinese art (like prominent brushstrokes and ink monochrome) and Japanizing them. The Kano School centered on the successive generations of the Kano family, supplemented by talented students who were adopted and then allowed to take the Kano name. It is another model for Kaikai Kiki. (Indeed, the phrase ''kaikai kiki,'' which means ''brave, strong and sensitive,'' was borrowed from a critic in the late 17th century who used it to describe the paintings of Eitoku Kano.) One of Murakami's favorite artworks is a screen depicting an old plum tree that was painted for a temple in Kyoto by Sansetsu Kano in the 17th century and is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In his ''Superflat'' essay, Murakami pointed to similarities between the spiky lines in Sansetsu's eccentric masterpiece and the designs of the leading anime artist Yoshinori Kanada. At about the same time, he produced a few paintings of his own in this style. Aside from his appreciation of the work, Murakami admires the way the Kano School perpetuated itself. He would like to start a line of comparable longevity. ''How did the Kano School survive 300 years or more?'' he once said to me. ''Japanese culture doesn't need to create an original something. A school is O.K. A little difference is great. Kakai Kiki School is O.K. ‐‐ Mr. and Chiho and Chinatsu.''

(from TOKYO SPRING!; The Murakami Method, by Arthur Lubow, Published April 3, 2005)

And now the preceding paragraph:

I could see why Murakami loves Kunikata's art. It reveals the fear and anger that lie just beneath the surface of the kawaii culture ‐‐ or, to adopt the metaphor of superflat, the feelings that are embedded right on the surface, for those who look closely and knowledgeably. The manner in which Kunikata's eating obsession seeps into every aspect of her art also reminded me of how, in Murakami's view, the atom‐bomb trauma permeates his country's culture. The pictures of Japan's past destruction are transposed into a catastrophic science‐fiction future, and the country's childlike relationship to the United States is embraced in a celebration of the kawaii (a word derived from kawaiiso, meaning ''pitiful'' or ''pathetic''). A similar thing occurs in another fraught area: sexual relations between young men and women. The otaku portrayals of sexuality ‐‐ fixated on compliant, air‐brushed schoolgirls ‐‐ are divorced from emotional reality, even from physical reality. This neutering of real life was epitomized by the enthusiastic reaction of Japanese children of Murakami's generation to the animated versions of atomic explosions and fire‐bombings they watched on TV. One reason these kids cheered the demolition of Tokyo is that it was accomplished by a wizard: the most influential special‐effects designer of the day, Eiji Tsuburaya, who learned his craft as a propagandist during World War II, preparing a rousing and convincing recreation of the (unfilmed) Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, Tsuburaya redirected his talents ‐‐ and his agents of

150 destruction ‐‐ into Godzilla, Ultraman, Rodan and Mothra. The imagery retained its stirring power. The context was secondary.

Obviously, to reduce the faceted realities of Japanese creative production and evolution over the centuries into the present to dualisms, as Peter Drucker attempts to do in “Japan Through the Lens of Japanese Art,” is critically inadequate. The above passages prove that conclusively.

That said, a lot has changed, since 1979. In fact nothing is exactly the same as it was, except maybe sentience, Zero, and cetera. Days are probably like snowflakes, and years even moreso. I suppose not much has changed in that respect, since 35,000 BC, when the prime sentient artists of Chauvet were painting excellent representations of Mastodon hunts. Nor from World War 2, pre‐Hiroshima (except everything).

From Rising ’44 (Davies, pg. 198), the story of the Polish resistance:

In the eyes of the Nazi hierarchy, the Underground fighters were mere ‘terrorists’. But as Kutschera had himself remarked: ‘There is no certain defence against people who are eager to sacrifice their own lives.’

A cryptic reduction of the perceptual apparatus in play to polarities, to tensions between points, provides the critic an artificially elevated discursive authority, but does nothing to reveal the truth. To posit truth in art criticism has for a hundred years been undermined by an array of agents, who use culture studies, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, gender issues, politics and other interpretive narrative to deflate a hierarchical structure for the positioning of art in social exchange. I’ve written about this extensively elsewhere (see Appendices).

Seeing art is now subject to new monopolies. Truth is identical to universal reality, although academic truth is another thing altogether. Perceived reality, which is thanks to new media social as well as individual, is now understood to be multi‐ dimensional. As soon as one realizes that contemporary art exhibits the capacity to represent multi‐dimensional perceptual realities, one must realize that command and control monopolies cannot withstand the threats posed by the new social vision. Art is only representative of this development. The evidence is all around us.

Take economics, and management ‐ Drucker’s specialty ‐ as examples. Trends in the continuum of take shape as hybrid disciplines. In organizational behavior, this realization has generated new non‐equilibrium forms. Shared Leadership is one such form of dissipative structure. Management’s adaptation to a more diverse, globally networked workspace and marketplace demands business be ever more

151 creative in managerial responses, and faster. Evaluation is key. Organizations can be analyzed by “peering” at them through strategic lenses, cultural lenses, and political lenses to paint a picture of the corporate culture, a necessity in a competitive environment hinging on identity maximization.

The new descriptive language is generated (flat or horizontal, diverse, fast) and is dimensional. It’s all dimensional, man.

No longer does any organization operate independent of other organizations, according to this narrative. And this narrative is expanded to describe the relations of nations in a worldwide context. Talk of global currency resurfaces. Protectionism is the enemy. Getting past no is the goal, in a mission‐wellness, newly green, fresh, and creative class world of high‐performing Knowledge Workers. Transparency is essential in a twittering world with a non‐stop news cycle. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 35,000 times.

From Community Informatics, Shaping Computer­Mediated Social Relations (Keeble and Loader, pg. 290), “Cultivating society’s civic intelligence” (Schuler):

Who – or what – will govern?

If the dire scenarios that Bill Joy describes (or even the less dramatic but no less worrisome environmental catastrophes that atmospheric and other scientists warn us about) have even a minuscule chance of occurring, an urgent need to consider ways to avert them arises. Since ‘solutions’ to these problems are likely to be protracted and multi‐pronged, and involve large segments of the citizenry, a correspondingly urgent need to analyse the preconditions underlying the development and successful implementation of these ‘solutions’ also arises. What ‘environments’ – social and technological – would be hospitable to the satisfactory resolving of these problems? If we could imagine humankind finding better responses to our myriad problems old and new, what circumstances and resources need to be in place and what steps could be taken that would support these new responses? These preconditions and steps we can call ‘civic intelligence’ or perhaps a ‘world brain’.

In art, the dissolution of analysis based on top‐down or vertical power distribution is essential to the deregulation and decentralization of the field, at any point in history. This is true of Drucker’s Japan, although his Epistemological analysis of Japanese art and society avoids this axiom, which is peculiar given Drucker is as responsible for mainstreaming the neo‐vertical polarity as anyone, even as the horizontal domain stretches across the spectrum of society’s lenses and sectors, focus groups and think tanks, video and phone conferences, email blasts, viral, social and instant messaging networks, around the globe. As Drucker related in “Know Your Time”:

Years ago when I first started out as a consultant, I had to learn how to tell a well‐managed industrial plant from a poorly‐managed one – without any pretense to production knowledge. A well‐managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well‐managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.

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Similarly, a well‐managed organization is a “dull” organization. The “dramatic” things in such an organization are basic decisions that make the future, rather than heroics in mopping up yesterday’s mistakes.

What drives Peter Drucker to avoid acknowledging Japan’s oppressive verticality in his essay? One answer might be that the Japanese art Drucker loves belongs to a Japan that is ordered by power. It is a Japan similar in structural analysis to pre‐ democratic, pre‐representational Europe. It is a Japan that can only be romanticized by the instruments of such power, or the beneficiaries.

An analog is the current “Let’s move on” argument against prosecuting Bush administrators who established a policy of torture. Why go through the heroics of “mopping up yesterday’s mistakes”? I suppose this might be viable, if life were a linear function, instead of circular function. I guess it would be the responsible thing to do on the Planet Line, wherever that might be. In this universe, on this planet, which rotates, and is a big, blue ball, that cow won’t fly.

Which doesn’t mean that cattle don’t fly. They fly on airplanes. They fly in The Wizard of Oz, during the tornado sequence. Sure you can build a machine to help a cow fly. All sorts of strange things happen during an upheaval, a cataclysm. Oh, yeah: and cattle fly in the imagination. When they fly in someone’s mind’s eye, that doesn’t make them fly out here. Epistemologists don’t get that. They become movie directors.

In dimensional painting there are are no mistakes, only layers. You keep adding layers until the painting’s done. You gather a better proportion of production knowledge in the process. Do no harm. Ahimsa.

It is no longer politically correct to celebrate European royal dynastic order. God save the King is a distinctly difficult bit of lingo, in the critical discourse arena. So the divine dynasty post‐Revolutionary market share is not good right now. Nazism in particular, but also Fascism and Marxism as ancillaries quashed the benevolent dictator idea. Mussolini in particular got a lot of good press just prior to joining the first and to date most effective Axis of Evil. I realize that as the charismatic hero in charge of the nation dream rotates on its axis like an early animation device (or a new one, like Arthur Ganson’s “Machine with Artichoke Petal #1), such as the choreutoscope, the flattened historical image of him does not seem real. That doesn’t mean to say the flattened image won’t pack a wallop. Kara Walker gets a lot of mileage out of caricature cutouts in positive and negative dualistic space. If you boil almost any position down to an either‐or proposition, the proposition will be fundamentally flawed. Don’t tell Sean Hannity that. It’s a conservative trope. Aside from the reasons one might enforce a mind‐diorama like that on a decision‐making process, in a spherical world, that cow won’t fly. Even if you repeat the argument

153 35,000 times, that cow won’t. The same cannot be said for exotic, non‐European dynasties, or their cultural expressions, such as the Tokugawa, or the Kano school, which might just be a marketing issue. One has to create a consumer again for that cow.

If the divine hero‐king is to recur, and it likely will give the waveform, he might manifest on a different human stage. Right now he lives primarily in the hearts of young mean. Most grown‐ups don’t realize how much is happening on those dadburned computers and game consoles to keep alive the dream of the divine warrior‐king. Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, recently passed away and was lovingly mourned by tens of millions, in silent homage mostly. Those funny dice and the expansion of odds and characteristics are working in the favor of the King, and against the Drucker vision of a boring world.

The tension, as everyone has now noticed, is building. Guns are being bought, supplies are being gathered, tribes are being assembled and so on. Lots of conservative Christians have been praying for the Apocalypse every day, every time they think of it. That age‐old concern of civilizations is getting widespread support from new news media. The tsunami that swamped Indonesia, killing hundreds of thousands, is still happening on YouTube. I can relive the moment any time I want. If I want to generate some low‐guage anxiety and adrenaline activity, I can dial up natural disaster footage and watch it over and over, like a Choreutoscope, as the world spins around. That is, by the way, an example of animated dimensional realism.

Sentient life is never bored.

Drucker’s selective vision in his essay and analysis may not be a measure of perceptual realization. Instead it may be a function of regret, for by all accounts Peter Drucker was a conscientious person. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes:

The imagination can create the future only if its products are brought over into the real. The bestowal of the work completes the act of imagination…when possible futres are given and not acted upon, then the imagination recedes. And without the imagination we co no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present; we will never be led into new life because we can work only from the known.

Decentralization and deregulation, as advocated by Drucker do not serve Democracy, nor do they serve art. Just because these practices of de‐defining, decentralizing and deregulating art and society have been embraced by the new global ruling monopolies, does not mean that they are benevolent. Nor does it mean that they serve art or freedom or truth. On the contrary, the fact that these practices

154 have been embraced by the prevailing monopolies should indicate that they have malevolent consequences. Again, the evidence is all around us to see, if we look out the window. More importantly, we can see them if we close our eyes and consider the heart.

On Heart as a Metaphor for Drucker’s Mirror Test

The sentient man doesn’t need a mirror. The manager does. Managing appearance is not sentience. Self‐reflection is never as competent as sentient projection.

It is always unfair, in a sense, to presume what was in a person’s heart. Science suggests the heart is an organ to pump blood. In 2009, we have enough evidence to know this to be true, thanks to plentiful advances in medical science. We will posit, for the purposes of poetic clarification, that “considering the heart” is a vernacular term meaning internal review.

Drucker said, “Ethics requires that you ask yourself, what kind of person do I want to see in the morning?” This is the Drucker “Mirror Test.” Art has long attempted to answer that question one painting at a time. The portrait is one answer. The autoportrait is the artist’s answer. The figurative painting is another. The reflective data is dimensional. The figurative painting is one of the most advanced tools ever produced by man for this purpose, which has broad spiritual, metaphysical and ethical implications.

The form is much debased. As a sentience enhancement device, which we can categorize as a form of serious play, dimensional figurative art has been attacked savagely, rigged and misused. This has done nothing ultimately to diminish its inherent value or truthfulness. Sentience will always sustain.

Over the past hundred and twenty years in the West, ironic people have undermined this game, and technologies (like TV) have re‐invented or animated it, and clever ad men have found the profit in it. What was lost in the mutation was the spiritual aspect of reflection.

Before the prevalence of photography, available locally through a studio, the painter served as his local mirror tester. Great painters of the human form were considered possessed of a gift that served all men, not just the immediate social topology.

Another mirror test in the arts was sited in the ballet studio. To witness the dancer’s relationship with the mirror‐as‐teacher is to recognize both the beauty and danger attendant to craft and practice in the continual presence of the objective critique.

155 How things have changed, since Degas and Goya’s times. The mirror now is the enemy of young girls’ psychology and the conscience of the manager. It is perhaps time to hold the mirror test up to the mirror test.

To understand the mirror is to understand perspective.

Anselm Kiefer is one of the greatest living perspectival artists. Over decades he has explored the dimensional with incredible results. As a post‐Bellum German painter, Kiefer has courageously faced the past social topology of Germany and projected a future for the art, and the country. It is a proud achievement, and one that justifies to a great extent the disgraceful Epistemological excesses of the period. Artists are as a rule very generous in that regard.

A recent retrospective of German art at LACMA, a brilliant exhibit, contained some terrific Kiefers, some similarly significant work by Gerhard Richter (equally accomplished in other dimensional aesthetic applications), and a very fine selection of lesser, but powerful representations of Germany’s social topology. The world required Germany to do the mirror test, in the aftermath of two World Wars, and Germany’s artists responded with great courage and conviction, and in many cases masterful craft and heightened sentience.

Concurrently and into 2010, the LA Opera is mounting Wagner’s Ring, and Achim Freyer’s staging is less successful on transitional grounds. Hitler admired Wagner, one of the world’s first and greatest multimedia, multi‐disciplinary practitioners of dimensional production. Freyer permits himself to sublimate the accomplishments of Wagner in the name of artistry, and the presumption is incorrect. Yet, in a hundred years, the Freyer Ring will be more understandable.

That Los Angeles is the host for these events is a function of the successful mutation of Druckerian management ideology into the globalist framework. The crucible effect is in full force, and it is a shame that Peter Drucker missed it. This would have been a big help, presumably, in Drucker’s mirror test.

Time – if you believe it – can be managed. Timing is a function of sentience.

The timing of the German arts invasion of LA couldn’t be worse, given the current economic catastrophe. In this case, the failures of globalism couldn’t be more clear. In fact, a dimensional analysis of the situation is illustrative of the crisis generally confronting American social topology today. A more thorough explanation is not possible here, but a summary is relevant.

First, the Ring is the best content choice imaginable for the drama. The narrative is perfect: Love must be abandoned for an individual to attain power over the world, and any who chooses the route of power over or without Love is cursed.

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Second, the manmade financial cataclysm environmentally proves the enduring truth of the drama. Other related aspects, pertaining to globalist ambition at the expense of local infrastructure, such as the viability of translation and interpretation as an enforced measure from the top down (the model), reveal systemic flaws in the contemporary arts relation to the unregulated and excessive globalist economy. The costs to people and in treasure are astounding, for a product of marginal local value. The Ring already has a home in Bayreuth. The future of LA Opera is in disarray. In the management class, no one is to blame. As the apologists are fond of saying, failure is a function of “perfect storm” conditions, unforeseeable and beyond the purview of any individual’s job description to account. The untruth of this ambivalence is perilous.

Third, the fractures in the LA, California and US social topologies, along the lines of class are distinctly on view. The racial divisions, the tensions between haves and have‐nots, the mandates of conservativism and liberalism: all are unveiled. Hollywood is not coming to the rescue. The unprosecuted managers of the banks, hedge funds, insurers, accounting firms, the politicians, the developers, the financial class – none are racing in to save the show. Eli Broad, that unbearably wealthy beneficiary of the disgraced AIG, is an exception, and what an exception he is. Under the current regime and its recent predecessors, Broad is an international arts mogul, plying his fortune into the strangled art palaces and positioning himself (and his wife) as the arbiter and manager of culture for millions of people. Free market, indeed.

Fourth, the local citizens are hardly represented, if at all, in any of these components of the topological composition of LAO Ring. In metro LA and its environs, a city serving a massively dispersed population of 14 or more millions of souls, not one of the two recent Ring performances sold out the house of a few thousand seats. Could it be any more obvious why this is so?

Forty‐seven miles east on the 10 is Claremont, and Drucker’s window. What would the father of modern management have had to say about this? Would he have preferred a kabuki performance to Freyer’s interpretation of the Ring?

From the perspective of the sentient position, The Ring is a great success. It exposes much incorrectness.

Imagine an LA Opera whose grounds and facilities are held in trust. Imagine an LAO free to all; whose life is divorced from the risk and liabilities of the financial class; an entity entrusted by the people, to the people for the people. Imagine a local government only entrusted with the safety of the people and the proper function of the democracy. Imagine an LAO only concerned with opera for LA. Imagine the content such an opera would produce. Imagine an economic setting for this

157 dimensional scenario, not based on ownership, but on trusteeship, or stewardship in perpetuity. Imagine an LA arts topology not beholden to the Eli Broads, but to all the citizens of LA, and to all sentient beings. Imagine the Ring narrative this would engender. These are the bones of a vision.

Then, understand that this dimensional vision of a sentient society is not only attainable, it is an absolute necessity. The cost of creating it is nothing compared to the cost of not creating it.

In Epistemological drama, we are asked to accept the cinema or theater of personal motivation, an internalized projection, as reality. It is defined as “suspension of disbelief.”

In Sentient art there is no drama, and it is not boring. There is only dimensional realism, which is the serious play for survival.

In the reality of Drucker’s management scheme, failure is not an option. It is an inevitability. Management only exists in the company of failure.

Anyone whose chosen field of interest is people, who sees them mostly in the mirror or through a window, really had ought to get out more often. Irish humor is lost on the Germans, especially Freud, who honored the Celts as the only race immune to his harmful mind game.

A therapist of Freudian descent is not a sentient person. He is a fractured mirror and a window looking out at nothing. A Freudian couch is not a place of rest or reflection for the sentient person.

Rumi, the great poet, achieved enlightenment by spinning continuously for thirty‐six hours.

With the Beloved's water of life, no illness remains In the Beloved's rose garden of union, no thorn remains. They say there is a window from one heart to another How can there be a window where no wall remains?

From Thief of Sleep, Shiva

158 Vision does not escape hindsight. They meet in the middle. For the sentient seer the meeting is harmonious. For the manager, the meeting is discordant, or like the shattering of glass.

Dream becomes expectation, and forges forward into future’s memory, and possibly regret. The perspective in three hundred sixty degrees is not reducible to a line.

If one makes something of the dream, then that is the artist’s way. If one by whatever means can force others to materialize someone’s approximate dream, for the benefit of the owner, then that is the manager’s way.

It is the luxury of living long that affords one the long view of dream meeting realization, or lack thereof. It is the luxury of the Episteme to critique the dream of another, and to call that a kind of dream.

Unfortunately, in a human topology not conditioned to prioritize individual dreams with collective reality, undedicated to the satisfaction of both, dischord is a general outcome. It is the religion of American Idol. It is the sadness of having not written the books one should have or wanted to, but instead having spent one’s life in service to a monopology that throws nine people “under the bus” to give one person the spotlight on the stage. It is possible to mix metaphors dimensionally. It is the sadness of offering a remedy to a sick relative, and, when the relative refuses the remedy, having to watch him suffer and die needlessly.

In the sentient world, a person or a collective choose life. In a world of followers, when the leader tells his followers to lead themselves, they are confused and fail.

In the sentient world, there is only attainment. Waste is an inevitable component of the managed world.

For verification, we can look again at The Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture for relevant data (especially the model on page 303, and the related discussions). For this author the most compelling argument generated by the cited model is the suggested relationship between mediocrity and monopolistic market power.

How would Drucker critique Murakami’s MoCA exhibit, “©”? Copyright as a defining code for a contemporary art superstar of international stature was, or should have been in the democratic arena, stunningly controversial. To some degree it was. Most critics commented on the Louis Vuitton and Murakami swag stores incorporated into the corpus of the exhibition. However, that commentary could hardly be characterized as negative.

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On the contrary, the Murakami show was not only a popular success, at least in LA, but most critics, with a few notable exceptions (the irascible Charlie Finch, for one), celebrated the vision of the Japanese artist. That the exhibit was never examined in the context of MoCA’s imminent downward spiral, along with shows like “WACK!” is indicative of the badly diminished state of public discourse on art and arts management currently.

Most of the criticism appearing in corporate media was more concerned with the reporting of Murakami’s biography and superficial details, such as the logistics of installation and use of materials. The precious print space, rarer with each passing year, was devoted by the art writer elites to soft cover concerns like Murakami’s collaborations with Kanye West and Vuitton, using these crossover elements to reinforce narratives about a new definition for art in the global popular society. Andy Warhol was repeatedly named as a reference.

Anecdote: I ran into Andy Warhol on a Manhattan sidewalk in 1986. I had just written a hateful essay about him for an art history course I audited at Notre Dame. He was windowshopping with a young companion.

) Regarding finish ‐ I’m still three credits shy of an art BA, thanks to that audit. I took the English Major and headed West, taking the contrary route.

When I encountered Andy, I was armed with a Colt Python with a 6” barrel. I think I thought of finishing Valerie Solanas’s job. I was mad at the time. Obviously I restrained myself. It’s a good thing I hadn’t finished the painting I was working on in Jersey City in the Par 3 house on Erie Street.

Still, to paraphrase the Ch’an, If you should meet Andy Warhol on the Road to the West, shoot him.

Compare Murakami’s coverage to the “coverage” of Shepard Fairey. Let’s assemble a dimensional composition with some of the relevant components or data. Fairey recently relocated his Studio One team (commercial, tactical, street and fine art production operations) to a new building at the entrance to Dodger Stadium on Sunset Boulevard in LA. He has been presenting excellent and compelling exhibits in a very well appointed gallery space in the frontage space of the building. Fairey was arrested on his way to his first museum retrospective at Boston’s ICA. Fairey’s incarceration was widely documented.

Compounding the ambivalence of a corporate press to the imprisonment (even if symbolically short, due mostly to Fairey’s ability to hire good attorneys), one of the

160 most powerful news organizations in the world began a systematic tactical campaign to claim ownership, or partial ownership, of the artist’s famous Obama “HOPE” campaign poster – one of which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

The Associated Press engaged the artist in legal correspondence, which compelled Fairey to bring suit in defense of his usage of the original photograph Fairey referenced in his now‐famous image. The LA‐based Fairey has been forced to embark on a publicity tour to counteract the message distributed by the corporate media giant. His enterprises were interrupted. The photographer who took the picture Fairey appropriated is also involved in the fray. Copyrights and compensation are the ostensible legal issues. Fairey downloaded a low‐resolution digital derivative of the original photograph from the web, along with many others. His final image is composed in Fairey’s signature style. He disseminated the landmark poster of then‐Senator Obama in support of the Obama campaign, through several distribution channels, not‐for‐profit. An after‐market demand for the prints blossomed almost immediately.

Fairey, for background, is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and an Idyllwild Academy alumnus. His meteoric career was launched by his viral “OBEY” campaign, now internationally famous and influential on an entire generation of visual producers. Fairey’s art is heavily influenced by punk, skater, and surf culture. His aesthetic opposes corporate mind control and perceptual manipulation through visual media. He has managed, throughout a prosperous career spanning the commercial and fine art fields, to maintain a popular connection that is unique. Currently, Fairey’s is a spectacular American success story. His many endeavors complement each other and are successful: the fine art gallery in Los Angeles; a successful ad agency with powerful corporate clients; healthy functional design and artist practices, supported by a distribution network as advanced and diverse in its portfolio of retail and wholesale options as any similar network in the world; and an extremely effective web‐based business. He is one of America’s most successful dimensional artists.

Why was he in jail? Defacing property. The authorities imprisoned him, ostensibly to make an example out of Fairey. By comparison, as of this writing, the release of “torture memos” clearly proves that America under George Bush engaged in the abuse of captives by US personnel. To date, no one responsible has been charged with a crime, much less imprisoned. An artist has done more time in jail for illegal street art, than have public officials who perpetrated crimes against humanity.

Fairey’s Obama phenomenon demonstrates how a single, self‐sustaining artist can ignite the opportunistic opposition of the global monopoly, through its strategic partners‐in‐arms. As long as Fairey operated in the creative industry as an unaffiliated, if not advocating player, he received the largesse of the monopoly.

161 When Fairey, by producing an artwork that arguably in real time affected the outcome of a national, and global, political outcome, he became a perceived threat.

To understand the mechanics of retaliation in the global society is not possible through the analytic means of simple causal effect. The forces involved are far too sophisticated to allow that to happen. One must possess a working knowledge of corporate, multinational AI to recognize the patterns.

Plausible deniability is essential to the globalist agent. By agent, I mean any individual or organization that relies on the global economic movement for sustenance.

The agent therefore might be the invisible owner of multinationals. Or the agent might be the worker whose paycheck derives from a multinational. Such a worker, a follower, has been trained to defend his employer (and accepts that paid directive).

The above description is brief, but ample for our purposes. The tactical reality is far more pervasive and complex, by design, than my representation of it, involving language, psychology, media, government, and economy triggers and controls. A shorthand term for the phenomenon might be “hive mind.” It is a defense against accusations of conspiracy from affected stakeholders. It is a defensive measure constructed in response to periods, especially in America, when popular movements forced the democracy to legislate against monopolies.

Hive Mind is the expressive medium of corporate management. Peter Drucker designed hive mind, but he didn’t name it (I did, or perhaps someone else did, and I appropriated it, or it named itself). Drucker just created the homunculus to house hive mind. He did name his golem: he called it The Knowledge Worker.

Today, monopolies operate in plain sight. They select the governmental officials whose jobs entail the regulation of the monopolies. They pay vast sums to elected officials to buy access and protection. They control the media through a variety of means (via the Boards, the shareholder stakes, the regulatory agencies, ownership, advertising dollars, access, etc.).

In short, and I am primarily discussing America here, the ruling monopoly controls the society, and has done so almost uninterrupted, by degree, since the Civil War. The threads that bind America (private property, political conservatism, European Christian values, including the dominion over all things great and small) to the pre‐ Revolutionary European social topology, are the gridwork of the monopoly.

162 In the sentient world, there is no monopoly. No artist can monopolize dimensional art. In the sentient art, the grid is not a measuring device for managing the translation of a scene to canvas (capturing). In sentient art, the grid is a field for play.

The clever Epistemologist finds employment where he cannot be made accountable for anything. He has a few people above him, and others below him in the hierarchy, as buffers for averting risk. He does not make anything but ideas, and produces only abstractions. He is paid in abstractions that derive from property and blood. His most precious accomplishment is his devoutness, his most useful tool is superiority, and his persona is humble. People like him consider him at the very least a useful man.

The First‐Third Worlds, as they are called, though the terms are in flux at present, may be ranked and reviewed based on their usefulness or potential usefulness to a globalist monopoly, concerned primarily with the workings of the three societal aspects or sectors Drucker defined for them: Government, Business and Social.

Here’s what a globalist nation critique sounds like [from The Next Great Globalization (Mishkin, pg. 125)]:

Today confidence in property rights in Argentina is at a low ebb. Why would domestic residents or foreigners make large investments when they know that their property rights can be violated on a politician’s whim? The current political climate is depressing. The government has been slow to restructure its once proud banking system to get it back on its feet. I see little willingness on the part of Argentina’s politicians to rebuild the institutions that they so blithely destroyed.

Argentina gets a bad ranking. The ranking list changes constantly. It is out of date as soon as it is written. The Epistemological list is like that. It is a hammer and a sickle.

FINISH

To lay the foundation for the finish of this essay, I will begin with several citations that are completely contemporary. They arrived in print (articles drawn from a daily and a quarterly periodical), and via email, as a link to a web source. These citations are meant to demonstrate the absolutely vital role that competent critique plays in furthering the expansion of sentient art in a democracy, in the dimensional form.

163 I will remind the viewer, that the premise of this essay is that the Drucker essay serving as the point of departure for the dimensional exploration would prove viable. Drucker’s “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” despite its obliqueness to Drucker’s oeuvre, despite its marginal relevance to the field of art criticism, could still lead to a proper dimensional outcome.

Now, let’s discover what is “visible, but not yet seen” in contemporary art.

The Problem

From “MoMA Pushes the Envelope in Works on Paper” (Smith, April 24, 2009, New York Times):

The Museum of Modern Art is deeply divided. It wants run wild and kick up it can’t imagine a world without fences. It wants to open up to new work, young art and diffirent ways of being a museum, but it often ends up doing things halfway, hedging its bets. That way lies mediocrity of a most tortured mode.

The remainder of the article touches on most of the issues in play in the contemporary art market that are symptoms of deregulation, globalist intervention, the durability of art and artists, the lack of critical and curatorial integrity, top‐down hierarchy, the confused mandates of the modern museum, and the perils of excess, speed, waste and scrutiny in the dimensional mashup that is current but not acknowledged in perceptual terms as applied methods.

The “Not a Problem” or (On Continued Sentient Progression)

From artcritical.com (April, 2009)

Glenn Goldberg: Welcome at Luise Ross Gallery By Stephanie Buhmann

March 26 – May 23, 2009 511 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues New York City

In an exhibition simply entitled “Welcome,” which features paintings, a wall piece, works on paper, and sculptures from the early 1990s till today, Glenn Goldberg makes a strong case for the whimsical and the poetic. “Watch and live, pay attention, do what you can,” is his personal manifesto (from a statement published by the gallery.) In a time when much of what is exhibited feels generalized, slick, and superficial, Goldberg offers a romantic approach to painting that feels honest and inspired. With a sensitivity that reminds us of Paul Klee, he succeeds in combining playful forms with a tantalizing sensibility for nuances of light and color.

164 Goldberg’s work has repeatedly been linked to Tantric art, in particular in the way it establishes an analogy between the micro ‐ and macrocosmic. However, the artist gleans from many sources and his works evoke many associations, ranging from Persian miniature paintings, Turkish tile patterns, and children’s book illustrations to works by artists as diverse as Richard Pousette‐Dart, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Thomas Noszkowski. There is much variety and it is Goldberg’s strength to remain beyond strict categorization. With confidence, he navigates directions between abstraction and referential drawing, musical rhythm and dreamlike release, monochromatic and highly polychromatic palettes. Most of his imagery is rooted in the organic and yet conglomerates of patterned forms can establish structures that hint at geometric organization.

Meanwhile, there is a striking naivite in Goldberg’s work. It seems to tell of a time detached from worldly concerns which, especially in times like these, betokens escapism. Goldberg’s content feeds into this notion. In some of the works at Luise Ross Gallery, dove‐like birds float freely through the compositions. They are delicately rendered, shown upside down, topsy‐turvy, in black, white, or grey, their wings always spread as open as flower petals. These mythic creatures are not as much set against painted grounds, as they are ingredients of the overall compositional pattern. They are weaving in‐ and out of abstract plants, emerging from dark skies, dancing on stringed ropes, and are at ease while shifting through the textured landscapes that surround them. Rather than actual animals, they appear as spirits, who indulge in their freedom. The fragility and innocence in these images can be linked to Picasso’s “Child with a Dove (1901) But there is also a strong sense of comfort here and Goldberg stresses the sentiment by naming his works “Blanket,” “Amidst it All,” and “Bloomer,” for example. As suggested in these titles, “things are kept safe,” “in the center of it all,” and “on the brink of flourish,” as long as they are in the hands of Goldberg. This goes along with Goldberg’s conviction that “art is supposed to take you towards, not away.”

Towards a Solution

From “Art, Code and the Engine of Change” (Hertz, Spring 2009 issue, CAA art journal):

The historian of science and literary critic N. Katherine Hayles argues that computational technology has become so interwoven in our experience as to shift the very concepts by which we array the world, constituting a “regime of computation” that pervades all our communications and by extension our entire culture. If the digital is so pervasive – and not only Hayles’s persuasive text but also the texture of everyday life in our society, critically observed, confirms that it is – then why don’t we see its manifestations and effects everywhere in contemporary visual art? The sturdy avant‐garde of the modern era seemed to have an endless appetite for machine aesthetics: witness the cult of speed in Futurism, the industrial forms of Constructivism, the space‐time geometry of Cubism, or the absurd antiart machineries of Dada. Is the computer different from other machines? What did artists do with it when it first appeared? Have computer artists made a unique and fruitful contribution to art history? If so, why are they largely absent from standard art histories? Is the computer transforming art just as it has transformed other aspects of the world – invisibly?

>>>

The iterative power of the computer stems from its power of representation. Digitization transforms continuous analogue values into discontinuous digital values – ones and zeroes.

165 This subtle but profound consequences. Computation extends the possibilities of art as a formal language. Though regarding art as a language can be problematic, it is very much in keeping with modernist projects, going back at least to Vasily Kandinsky’s Point and line to Plane. In this key text of twentieth‐century art, Kandinsky drew on musical theory to develop an analogous theory of abstract visual form. In a digital representation, if an element can be encoded, it can be repeated, varied, grouped with other elements, and transformed. The ancient practices of permutation, combination, and variation, associated with imagery of creative power, mystical insight, and revelation from historical times, can be fully explored on the computer for the very reasons that fractal geometry and deterministic chaos can be fully elaborated only on a computer, though their initial discovery also antedates it: the power of iteration that a computer unleashes, sweft and tireless, delivers in minutes or days what a human being could not in a lifetime. The plotter drawings Large Landscape: Ochre and Black by Charles Jeffries Bangert and Collette Stuebe Bangert and Loque Noire by Jean‐Pierre Hebert reveal an exactitude and tireless repetition that would be hard for a human being to match, yet they are naturalistic, not geometric, recalling grass or water. Both depend on subtle variations in the repetition of lines. A curved line could be regarded as their fundamental linguistic element, but it is an element in an asesthetic language spoken by the artist rather than in a computer language “spoken” by a machine.

Some of the earliest computer art operates with geometric transformations in scale, rotation, reflection, shearing, warping, or more exotic functions. Sine Curve Man by Charles Csuri (American, born 1922) with James Shaffer, and Gravel Stones by George Nees (German, born 1926) are good examples. Nees presents the “randomly organized decay of a composition of small squares or stones,” applying “slowly growing dislocation and a similar growing angle of rotation.” Csuri and Shaffer produced their work by superimposing many images of a digitized drawing displaced by sine waves. Though Sine Curve Man began as a graphics experiment, with time it has become an emblem of the transformation of humans by computers. As often happens with art, meaning accrues beyond the artist’s intention. In Gravel Stones a gradient of increasing randomness, not unlike color or value gradients in traditional media, signals the capacity of computation to manipulate structural qualities of visual elements in highly controlled ways. The level of abstraction necessary to encode the image brings visual art closer than ever to musical composition.

In the algorithmic technique of recursion, the results of transformation are passed back to the transformation, which then passes the transformed results back to itself again, and so forth. When one sees the same pattern or operation functioning at different scales (“fractal self‐similarity” is the mathematical term), it is very likely that recursion is involved, as in Slickrock III by Ken Musgrove (American, born 1955) and Antisana II by Pascal Dombis (French, born 1965). The “dimples” that carve out Musgrave’s rock landscape are all similar, though different in size, as are the broken ellipses in Antisana II. While some recursive techniques produce regular geometric images, they are often use to model natural phenomena – Musgrave designs software to model whole worlds entirely defined by algorithmic functions. Recursion can be used to model not just the geography of entire worlds but also large‐scale dynamic processes that might take place within such geographies. Computer models of evolution use recursive operations on randomly altered generations of data that represent organisms. In his 1979 book Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter argues that consciousness itself can be modeled as a recursive dynamic system. Metaphorically it makes sense: early video art used recursion (video feedback) to explore the implications of “seeing yourself seeing yourself.”

Some systems of algorithims can change over time and operate with minimal intervention once they are set in motion. These are variously referred to as dynamic systems, generative systems, agents, or expert systems, depending on different factors in their programming. Dynamic systems can reveal emergent forms – entities that are not apparent in the rules of the system but arise as a result of their interactions. Peter Beyls (Belgium, born 1950) and

166 Harold Cohen (American, born England, 1928) both developed early systems that modeled knowledge about the act of drawing. Their programs could operate with a loarge degree of autonomy to make unique drawings. As Cohen developed algorithmic methods for describing cognitive aspects of drawing and knowledge about drawing, plants, people, or other objects, he created a computational engine, AARON, that has evolved over many years as the primary source of his art. Fractals, dynamicsystems, deterministic chaos, generative systems, and autonomous agents provide us with new metaphors and mapping for a wide range of processes in human society and in the natural world – indeed, they merge these artificially separated realms by modeling both with the same processes. They go well beyond the mathematics that Kandinsky evoked for the “future of artistic harmony,” capable of expression “in terms irregular rather than regular.”

Iteration and recursion both depend on the capacity of the computer to transform selcted blocks of data and are a result of this ower of representation: a graphical display maps data that may have no actual visual content onto spatial dimensions, colors, textures, icons, and other graphical elements so that we can understand the data better. Shoefield by Sonya Rapoport (American, born 1923) represents physical and emotional data about people’s shoes gathered at a “shoe‐in” in a series of graphs, including a force‐field map graphing the similarity of responses as magnetic domains. This work of alienated science plays with and subtly undermines scientific representations of knowledge.

The cut‐and‐paste aesthetics of mash‐up and digital collage are also results of the computer’s power of representation. Many artists use algorithmic techniques to select images from a database or from the internet and then assemble them into new compositions. For example, Jason Salavon’s series The Grand Unification Theory arranges every second of an entire film into a dense grid of small images classified by luminosity. Because encoding into binary bits makes all media interchangeable, numeric values that represent an image may also be used to represent an audio signal, or vice versa – a technique known as transcoding, popular in VJ and DJ performances. Similarly, values that encode shape or color may be reused to encode position in space or may be fed into the settings for an operation that deforms curves in a random but controllable manner. Roman Verostko (American, born 1929) created an artist’s book, Derivation of the Laws of the Symbols of Logic from the Laws of the Operations of the Human Mind (1990), in which the parameters that determine a randomly generated, large‐ scale brushstroke are passed to another method that determines the locations and densities of small’scale lines on a facing page. Each book has a unique front‐ and end‐piece, although the underlying code is the same. Kandinsky, in Point and Line to Plane, describes how visual attributes of a line or shape can act contrapunctally, in parallel or contrary motion. Transcoding in computational media develops this idea further, over multiple sensory modalities and levels of granularity.

For some artists, new forms derived by computation appear as elements in a modern Wunderkammer, marvels brought into the realm of human understanding, as in Manfred Mohr’s taxonomies of transformed cubes or in the visionary landscapes of David Em (American, born 1952). Melding influences as diverse as Cubism and contemporary physics, Tony Robbin (American, born 1943) creates two‐ and three‐ dimensional representations of four‐dimensional space. Verostko mines the work of the mathematicians George Boole and Alan Turing to pose questions on the limits of logic and decidability. Such works hint at the possibility of a digital sublime, an algorithmic re‐creation of the marvelous. Unlike the computer‐generated carags and mists of Hollywood fantasy (the digital sublime verging on kitsch), these images do not attempt to re‐create Romantic Einfuhlung by posing pictorial conventions as a shorthand for emotions; rather, they charge the gap between concept and realization with the potentioal for insight. In this way they may more authentically engae the spirit of the Romantics, who compared the bold inquiry of science into the laws of nature to the insight of the poet nto the spiritual unity of nature. Hans Dehlinger’s Kosovo: War Refugees Counting Table (1999) binds a much darker meaning tho the iterative power of the

167 computer. Over three panels, thousands of almost imperceptibly different pen strokes count reguees in the Kosovo conflict. In an age when simulation does not merely mediate reality but overtakes it, we must avail ourselves of simulation to comprehend the scope of tragedy.

>>>

The historical record suggests several responses to the question posed early in this essay as to why computer art has not had a significant presence in the art world. With their lack of formal training in the arts, most pioneers of computer art qualified as outsider artists, with all the barriers to acceptance the label suggests. Their work also presented scientific and mathematical concepts that were difficult for art historians, curators, and critics to understand, especially given the paucity of art‐historical discourse on the relationship of art, technology, and science. Early computer art was mostly exhibited at technical and scientific conferences, or in technical and scholarly journals, where its conceptual framework was readily understood. When formally trained artists began using new media, they were interested in alternative venues – not just conferences and media festivals, but the emerging internet, which could serve as medium, means of distribution, and marketplace. Museums and galleries are still scrambling to adapt to online culture, where a new generation of artists has taken up residence. Many authors have already discussed the difficultires of marketing computer and new media art, typically comparing its situation to that once occupied by photography. Rejection of work created by nonartistis, the development of the medium in venues outside the art word, and the difficulty of marketing the objects produced explain much of the art world’s resistance to computer art. In the United States, reaction to the war in Vietnam also led to a forceful rejection of technology by many artists, critics, and curators,. Underlying all of these issues is the art world’s lack of control of outsider artists, outsider concepts, outsider venues, and outsider technology. Ultimately, as the writer and new‐media artist Carol Gigliotti explains, “The digital realm has accomplished the breaking up of the aesthetic canon through its ability to create, reproduce, and distribute, outside the economic circles on which the art world is based.” If the digtal realm has been instrumental in deconstructing the authority of high art, it is not surprising that when museums first began to show digital work, it was usually by an artist already recognized in the art world, thus reestablishing legitimacy and control. Though the art world has not yet fully accepted computer art, at least there are signs that curiosity and cultural ferment (and self‐interest) are overcoming its resistance. Imaging by Numbers and other recent exhibitions of digital art by mainstream institutions mark hopeful moments, when artists, engineers, and scientists who have labored outside the mainstream may be recognized for their artistic achievements and enter into the historically recorded discourse of culture. Indeed, it may matter less that computer art be recognized as a singular contribution to art history than that it connects neglected but significant aristic practices to contemporary visual culture and society, and opens the way for a long‐overdue discussion of the intersections of art, technology, and science.

If it is certain that computer art must be exposed to the same critiques that shaped contemporary art, it is also clear that it has its own body of theory and shear of formal strategies to contribute. Early computer art borrowed its formal lexicon from science. Pioneering artists decoupled the forms of sceience and mathematics from their contexts and opened them to processes where could be mapped onto new meanings. They borrowed concepts from contemporary art and recast them as code. As virtual art or information art, or whatever term of art applies, computer‐generated art continues to evolve but now can draw on a history and tradition of its own. Given the scope of change computational technology has wrought by distributing and decentering economy, culture and personal consciousness, the forms and concepts of computer art seem poised to acquire increasing depth and significance as representations of human experience. Virtual art offers the potential for new formal and symbolic explorations, a freshening wind after the doldrums attendant on the demise of the avant‐garde. It leads to new concepts of authorship and

168 participation, particularly when it is opened to interactivity. Most of all, it has something relevant to say about our own lives, when computation has worked its way into popular consciousness as a new paradigm, wherein the universe, the body, and the mind no longer function as clockwork but as computers. Alienated science informs popular imagination. Cultural narratives of technology offer both digital utopias and are amenable to computer representations. The confluence of computer art with the mainstram could hardly be more timely – it offers not radical confrontation, but the opportunity for new discourse and enthusiasm.

Obviously, the computer is not the moron that Peter Drucker concluded it to be. The truth is Peter Drucker missed this critical development in art, a truly global phenomenon of tremendous importance to every sector of the social ecology. He must have been too busy looking out his window or at ancient Japanese art to notice. Drucker should have been looking at the screen of his computer monitor (I don’t know if Peter used a computer – PJM).

The computer is a sentience enhancement device.

Understanding why Murakami passes the acid test for the globalist social elite and Fairey lands in a Boston jail is critical to understanding the invisible subject of Drucker’s essay. That is, what is the last obstacle to the World Capitol relocating to, say, Davos (that might be too obvious), or Salzburg?

At first read, this might seem a mad proposition. In light of recent events, especially the G20 Summit, perhaps the notion appears less radical. To view the lens through the rearview mirror of Peter Drucker’s trajectory, his career and the evolution of his ideology, reinforces the suggestion substantially. To introduce the trajectory of the contemporary art world over the period coinciding with Drucker’s rise to prominence suggests an even stronger correlation and ratification.

I would suggest that what the tensions and polarities Drucker frames in “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” especially those between the poles of individual and collective, are simply the expression of a civilization that is subject to socio‐political and economic monopoly over centuries. The juxtaposed cases of Murakami and Fairey point to the tensions and polarities extant in the new globalist monopoly.

Another pair of cases, one culled from the “outer” art world, the other from the “inner” art world, by way of anecdote, might prove helpful here. First, we will look at the “outer” art world.

169 Great controversy surrounded the exhibit “Sensation,” mounted first by the Royal Academy of Art in London. The show featured most prominently the Young British Artists (YBA), largely the creation as a “movement” or “school” by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi. “Sensation travelled to Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum, and most famously to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Saatchi and his brother (Saatchi & Saatchi) built a massive fortune, by, among other enterprises, producing ad campaigns that furthered or promoted the radical restructuring of British society by Margaret Thatcher. The “Sensation” story is some important ways the Saatchi story.

Charles Saatchi shifted his primary interests from commercial art in the subsequent post‐trickle‐down‐boom bust to fine art, riding a wave of economic investment in contemporary art that yielded mega‐stars like Damien Hirst, who at present is the wealthiest and probably most savvy © artist in the world. Saatchi championed (and in some cases destroyed) many other YBAs, including Gillian Wearing, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Marcus Harvey. His practice of buying artist work in lots and at later dates arbitrarily divesting his collection of work by the truckload earned him a very mixed reputation among artists, critics, dealers and other collectors. The practice could be, in terms of an artist’s economic viability, tantamount to a “hit job.”

Saatchi has been characterized variously as a genius, a crass commercial opportunist, a destroyer of culture and taste. What is clear is that Saatchi has managed, through economic strong‐arm tactics and clever manipulation of the market and public perception, to establish a position of power in the international art business.

Today, his galleries and internet‐based operations are among the most influential and innovative in the world, in Druckerian terms. “Sensation” cemented his status as a prime mover. The exhibit was scandalous from the outset, as was Saatchi’s relentless promotion of previously unknown and typically ambitious young academic artists, collected and advanced by Saatchi, it seemed, on the basis of their ability to shock and repulse normative, popular aesthetic sensibilities. Whether by content or contingency, the YBAs elicited or provoked reactionary responses from many directions, some based on social offence, others on offence rooted in traditional ideals attached to art (art as a spiritual, philosophical or humanistic vehicle).

Saatchi, however, leveraged the public and collegial outrage, to the envious chagrin of his competitors, into a successful campaign propped by free speech advocates and the patronage of the global elites, many of them newly wealthy as a result of widespread economic deregulation. To characterize the Saatchi and “Sensation” phenomenon as a function of deregulation of the art world would be correct.

One of the artists in “Sensation” was Chris Ofili. Ofili’s work depicting the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung provoked the ire of New York politician Rudy Giuliani. At the time, Giuliani, a Catholic and mayor of the city, threatened to de‐fund

170 the Brooklyn museum for hosting “Sensation.” The institution chose to show the artworks, including Ofili’s, deemed offensive by Giuliani and others, including Catholic Church officials. Giuliani, in the fray, was quoted, "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion." Some of the city’s most powerful religious leaders who lobbied for sanctions or to prevent the display of the YBA art did so to no avail.

The exhibit went on amidst the controversy, drawing massive crowds and support from across the cultural spectrum. The event became a touchstone for the conservative movement in the US, providing substantial fodder for the campaign of George W. Bush for President. Ofili’s artwork was defaced during the exhibit, which was in large measure funded by Saatchi (at least $160,000) and indirectly involved Christie’s auction house, a market partner of Saatchi’s, in what clearly were commercial conflicts of interest for a publicly supported cultural institution. “Sensation,” which had been slated to finish its world tour at the National Gallery of Australia, was cancelled after Brooklyn. The director of the National Gallery of Australia cited the conflicts in the States as prime reasons for the cancellation of the show in his venue.

The second case is anecdotal. During a stint as an art handler in 2005 or ‐6 in Los Angeles, I was assigned to a client for collection maintenance and installation. The job site was the client’s $50 Million estate in Beverly Hills. The owner, a media executive, had decorated his property with an extensive art collection, mostly comprised of pieces by modern masters, but also including more traditional works. The collection, although no totals were discussed, was certainly worth tens of Millions.

The property manager, who supervised our work, noticed that my coworker and I were playing a game of “name the artist” as we made our way through the massive compound. He joined in, and the game evolved into an exercise in stumping the art handler. Our guide was surprised that between the two of us, we were able to identify all of the pieces he pointed to. Upping the ante, the property manager paused in front of a de Kooning.

He asked us what we thought those “little black things” embedded in the painting surface might be. Neither of us ventured a guess. “Rat poop,” he informed us. The property manager went on to describe how the Getty appraiser hired to review the collection had instructed the owner and house staff to under no circumstances attempt to clean the scat off the artwork, which he valued at $35,000,000. The appraiser claimed that the rat dung spoke to the authenticity of the work, since it had accumulated while the painting dried on the floor of the artist’s studio in New York. Removing the rat dung, of which there were four pellets, would devalue the artwork, therefore, by as much as a third. The math should indicate to the reader the value, in the converse, of each piece of rodent excrement. Each pellet is worth about $3,000,000.

171 Compare this case to Ofili’s. Drucker might color the comparison in terms of tension, a function of polarities. I would call the reader’s attention to the fact that the Brooklyn Museum “Sensation” case solidified Giuliani’s profile for the American cultural Right. Giuliani’s performance during the 9/11 crisis in conjunction with his portfolio of conservative bona fide, including his reputation as a culture warrior, nearly propelled him to the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008. Certainly, his adamant opposition to Ofili’s artwork in particular and the “cultural elite” who promote and defend such art in, has elevated Giuliani’s stature in the National socio‐ political discourse among social conservatives and Christian voters. To suggest that the improvement in Giuliani’s economic fortunes has risen with the tide of his conservative political ascent does not mean the link between the two trajectories is causal, nor does it disprove it.

The two cases above reveal much about the art monopoly and the global monopoly it serves and represents. The functions of the cultural monopoly are subtly revealed by the strange tensions and polarities described. These cases also reveal a great deal about how the art world has changed, since the Second World War. The timeline is concurrent with Peter Drucker’s career.

From a sentient or dimensional art perspective, there is a complex distinction between the de Kooning and Ofili animal waste. One can learn much about many aspects of social topology, individual sentience, and collective response, not to mention valuation and economic or racial relativity, by comparing the respective works, the artist biographies and embedded cultures they represent.

From a structural perspective, there is almost no difference between the two. From an Epistemological perspective, it’s the difference between night and day, and a thousand years of social ecology.

> The Artists

Willem de Kooning was one of the celebrated New York school of Abstract Expressionists. He was European‐born (Rotterdam, 1904) and –educated. His training included an early apprenticeship in commercial art, and attendance at the Academie Voor Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschapen (1916‐1924), now known as the Willem de Kooning Acadamy; he also studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux‐Arts in Brussels and the van Schelling School of Design in Antwerp. He immigrated to the US in the interwar period. Working illegally for a time in New York, de Kooning eventually integrated in the artist society of the city and was a beneficiary of the New Deal’s Federal Art Project in 1935. From thereon, de Kooning was self‐supporting as an artist. He was naturalized as a US citizen in 1962, more than a decade after executing his famous “Women” paintings, and establishing himself as one of the most important painters of the era. Two years after becoming a citizen of the US, de Kooning was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

172 Chris Ofili was born in Manchester, England (1968) and attended the following institutions: Thameside College of Technology, London (1987‐88); Chelsea School of Art, London (1988‐91); Hochschule der Kunst, Berlin (1992); and the Royal College of Art, London (1991‐93). About his use of elephant dung:

Ofili first discovered his focal attraction while on a British Council traveling scholarship to Zimbabwe in 1992 (in an exasperated attempt to express the intensity of his experiences, he'd thrown a lump of.dried dung onto a canvas, and liked the result), so there's a ready‐made back‐to‐Africa‐and‐into‐ identity myth that has now become indelibly attached to his work. ‐ ArtForum, September, 1997, by Louisa Buck

Ofili was awarded the Turner Prize in 1998. He has had many gallery and museum exhibits, since.

> Notations

Both men were the beneficiaries of articulated educational systems and governmental support at critical junctures in their respective artistic evolutions. De Kooning’s training was classical and commercial. Ofili’s was modern and culture‐sensitive, though no less commercial. Both ostensibly rejected or rebelled against the predominant culture to produce a signature figurative style. Each artist’s most famous work depicted female form in an expressive, peculiar figurative representation. Both became rich and famous within the context of a liberal democracy. If one views art through a linear progressive lens, Ofili is the artistic descendent of de Kooning, the original “Action Painter.” Both owe their technical innovative basis to Jackson Pollack. Both de Kooning and Ofili are the beneficiaries of fortuitously‐timed transnational upward economic migration.

> Dimensional Analysis of the Art

>>> (Inconclusive)

In the broader narrative of this essay, both de Kooning and Ofili represent a lineage, which also contains Glenn Goldberg, Jackson Pollack and hundreds or thousands of others cited herein and elsewhere in great abundance in my past texts (including myself). This lineage also contains Peter Drucker. These are all people who came to know freedom of expression through American democracy, either directly or indirectly.

As for the short list of painters above, they derive from Pollack. Jerry Saltz wrote this review of the 2006 Guggenheim exhibit of Pollack’s paintings on paper:

173 Pollock stretched the diverse strands of Cubism and Surrealism beyond recognition. He pulled apart the Mexican muralists, pulled in the dribbling techniques of Navajo sand painting and gave various ersatz mystical tendencies of his day an unprecedented optical force and psychic coherence. "He broke the ice," as de Kooning so generously put it. By 1950, at the height of his powers, there is nothing old left in Pollock’s art, except maybe paint and canvas. By way of comparison, when the 25‐year‐old Picasso made Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, he initially thought it might be a "bad painting." When the 35‐year‐old Pollock finished Lucifer in 1947 he had to ask his wife, painter Lee Krasner, "Is this a painting?" Lucifer is a green, black and pearly discharge, a phosphorescent radioactive snapshot of what America looked, felt and sounded like in 1947.

From Gardner’s Art through the Ages:

Pollack explained, “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting.

Which, from a sentient perspective begs the question, Did Jackson Pollack’s breakthrough open the perceptual doors, not just to painters on an innovative or technical level, but to the possibility for sentient expansion that took form in the personal computer? Would the PC have come to exist without Jackson Pollack’s contributions to the social topology? Would the production of the PC been possible without the Management ideology of Peter Drucker? Would any of these radical advances been possible in a system where perceptual evolution and the movement of people didn’t exist? Could any of these advances have occurred prior to World War 2? Would the entry of the United States into the Second World War occurred absent Pearl Harbor, and is it possible to imagine the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, without first coming to terms with Japan’s social topography, as evidenced in the samples Peter Drucker wrote about? Finally, would Jackson Pollack be possible, absent Pearl Harbor, or the explosive trajectory of cultural exchange it represents?

Who knows?

Amplifications on the Global Art Market

The global art market is a greedy moron.

For amplification, I will refer the reader to Appendix 1, a thing.net blogpost by Joseph Nechvatal in response to a Jerry Saltz essay, “Seeing Dollar Signs,” published in artnet just before the art market balloon deflated in 2007. According to Wikipedia, Nechvatal “is a post‐conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer‐assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom‐ created computer viruses.”

174 Below is the rest of Joseph Nechvatal’s Wiki‐bio, for several reasons, which I hope to make clear. The most pertinent is to raise the question, “Why was Peter Drucker prone to focus on ancient Japanese Art for aesthetic pleasure, and not on the dynamic artistic developments driven by American contemporary artists?”

Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago. He studied fine art and philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Cornell University and Columbia University, where he studied with Arthur Danto while serving as the archivist to the minimalist composer La Monte Young. From 1979, he exhibited his work in New York City, primarily at the Brooke Alexander Gallery and Universal Concepts Unlimited. He has also solo exhibited in Paris, Chicago, Cologne, Los Angeles, Aalst, Belgium, Youngstown, Senouillac, Lund and Munich.

His work in the early 1980s chiefly consisted of postminimalist gray graphite drawings that were often photomechanically enlarged.[1] During that period he was associated with the artist group Colab and helped establish the non‐profit cultural space ABC No Rio. In 1983 he co‐founded the avant‐garde electronic art music audio project Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine.[2] In 1984, Nechvatal began work on an opera called XS: The Opera Opus (1984‐ 6) with the no wave musical composer Rhys Chatham.[3]

He began using computers to make "paintings" in 1986 and later, in his signature work, began to employ computer viruses. These "collaborations" with viral systems positioned his work as an early contribution to what is increasingly referred to as a post‐human aesthetic. [4]

From 1991–1993 he was artist‐in‐residence at the Louis Pasteur Atelier in Arbois, France and at the Saline Royale/Ledoux Foundation's computer lab. There he worked on The Computer Virus Project, which was an artistic experiment with computer viruses and computer animation. [5] He exhibited at Documenta 8 in 1987.

In 1999 Nechvatal obtained his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology concerning immersive virtual reality at Roy Ascott's Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, Newport, UK (now the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth). There he developed his concept of viractualism, a conceptual art idea that strives "to create an interface between the biological and the technological."[6] According to Nechvatal, this is a new topological space.

In 2002 he extended his experimentation into viral artificial life through a collaboration with the programmer Stephane Sikora of music2eye in a work called the Computer Virus Project II, [7] inspired by the a‐life work of John Horton Conway (particularly Conway's Game of Life), by the general cellular automata work of John von Neumann, by the genetic programming algorithms of John Koza and the auto‐destructive art of Gustav Metzger.

In 2005 he exhibited Computer Virus Project II works (digital paintings, digital prints, a digital audio installation and two live electronic virus‐attack art installations) in a solo show called cOntaminatiOns at Château de Linardié in Senouillac, France. In 2006 Nechvatal received a retrospective exhibition entitled Contaminations at the Butler Institute of American Art's Beecher Center for Arts and Technology.

Dr. Nechvatal has also contributed to digital audio work with his noise music viral symphOny, a collaborative sound symphony created by using his computer virus software at the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University.

Nechvatal teaches art theories of immersive virtual reality and the viractual at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (SVA) and at Stevens Institute of Technology.

175

Nechvatal’s artistic interests and career as a creative and education professional originate in America’s Midwest. He has over several decades integrated emerging electronic technologies into what is basically a very traditional academic art practice. Nechvatal, one would think, epitomizes Drucker’s notion of the Knowledge Worker in the field of contemporary art.

Nechvatal’s commentary on Jerry Saltz’s essay is an excellent summation of developments in the field, and the former’s bio should be convincing to the reader that the concerns are those of a legitimate professional, an insider, a stakeholder, a productive and acclaimed innovator. Nechvatal’s grasp of the issues is broad and deep. The informal quality of his communication is appropriate for the web medium, which one can argue affirmatively, is integral to Nechvatal’s general skill set, and appropriate for the era. His credentials, as it were, are in order. He writes:

For many, the art market is a communal version of the Primal Scene—a sexed‐up site that offers a peek into the bedroom of the creative act. Art advisers and collectors now treat art fairs and auctions like Warhol's Factory: Places to flaunt junkie‐like behavior while hoping one's creative potential might bloom. In this global circus, mega‐collectors like Charles Saatchi and Francois Pinault are the art world's P.T. Barnums: showmen who have become part of the show—moguls who understand that the market is a medium that can be manipulated.

Once upon a time, the market and the scene (clubiness, chicanery, and profligacy notwithstanding) were joined and reflected social, political, and sexual change. Now the market is only in service of itself. The market is a perfect storm of hocus‐pocus, spin, and speculation, a combination slave market, trading floor, disco, theater, and brothel where an insular ever‐ growing caste enacts rituals in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight.

Is the art market making us stupid? Or are we making it stupid? Consider the lame‐brained claim made by Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer, who recently effused "The best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart." This is exactly wrong. The market isn't "smart;" it's like a camera—so dumb it'll believe anything you put in front of it. Essentially, the art market is a self‐replicating organism that, when it tracks one artist's work selling well, craves more work by the same artist. Although everyone says the market is "about quality," the market merely assigns values, fetishizes desire, charts hits, and creates ambience. These days the market is also too good to be true.

Still, the slap‐happy assertions keep coming. Last season, Amy Cappellazzo, international co‐head of Christie's post‐war and contemporary art, crowed that auction houses were "the big‐box retailers putting the mom‐and‐pops

176 out of business." Then she gushed of her clients, "After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there?" After wondering, "What's a G5 jet?", you may well ask how the current super‐heated art market is changing the ways we see and think about art.

The market is now so pervasive that it is simply a condition —as much a part of the art world as galleries and museums. Even if you're not making money—as is the case with most of us— that's your relationship to the market. To say you won't participate in the market is like saying you refuse to breathe the air because it's polluted.

The current market feeds the bullshit machine, provides cover for a lot of vacuous behavior, revs us up while wearing us down, breeds complacency, and is so invasive that it forces artists to regularly consider issues of celebrity, status, and money in their studios. Yet, it also allows more artists to make more money without having to work full‐time soul‐crushing jobs and provides most of us with what Mel Brooks called "our phony‐baloney jobs." Last December, more than 400 New York art dealers representing more than 5,000 artists paid for booths in one art fair or another in Miami to participate in this market. Everyone is trying the best they can. For critics to demonize the entire art world, then, as somehow unethical and crass seems self‐ righteous, cynical, and hypocritical.

The Jerry Saltz article to which he’s responding > (see Appendices)

Vehicles

The vehicles for disseminating artwork in the global economy have never been more plentiful, or complex. Spectacular technological innovation has transformed bidding at an auction, for example, into a potently international process happening in real time.

Reproduction technology advances have dramatically redefined the distribution patterns for images. Downloads enable viral dissemination of relevant and timely visuals. The recent case of Shepard Fairey’s famous Obama “Hope” poster demonstrates the dichotomy: a prized fine art edition item on the one hand, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, and a largely unregulated and ubiquitous popular culture viral brand on the other. I have written about this extensively elsewhere, but for the purposes of this paper would suggest that the continuing legal issues surrounding Fairey’s production of what is possibly the most recognizable political portrait of all time (competitors include Che, Mao, and the US Presidents appearing on our currency) are directly informative on the topic of social topology versus ecology/economics/globalism.

177 No one can legitimately argue that the means of artistic production have never been more broadly accessible, and the means of distributing art have never been more diverse. Nonetheless, one hardly ever hears discussion either inside the art industry or in popular discourse about the concentration of market power, and its stranglehold on content.

A recent panel discussion in New York (the “Intelligence Squared US” series at Rockefeller University, February 2009, covered in ArtForum’s blog “Scene & Herd”) sought to address the issue of art industry regulation, and the state of the art regarding ethics.

New York is still the center for the art market. The preponderance of art stars live there or exhibit at top New York galleries and in the museums, and their careers are made there. The blogosphere, and web‐based content are vastly outpacing the traditional art critical media, as is true in all fields of published media. For now, though, the “legitimate” art press is still located in New York.

IQ Squared US occurred at an historically charged moment, in the city most directly impacted by the financial sector’s crash. As a result, the Rockefeller University panel was scrutinized by the fine arts field, which was looking for presumptive leadership. The audience at a CAA conference panel on art criticism, which I attended the following week in LA, engaged in a discussion of the New York panel results.

One of the panelists, art critic Jerry Saltz, known amongst art media elites as a great friend of the artist, argued stringently and with some concern against any regulation of the art business. “I think you have to just let the art world be what it is,” Saltz said. “Yeah, it’s unethical, but no more than you are.”

Some other highlights:

(Senior dealer Richard) Feigen, up first, argued that the art market is relatively unethical because it lacks regulation and offers buyers little protection. He got particularly fired up over “chandelier bidding” (the auction‐house practice of making fake bids in order to stimulate competition), perhaps in part because he’d been called “a horse’s butt” for suggesting that eliminating the practice would take the drama out of sales. Slamming the strategy as inherently deceptive, he concluded that the auctioneer’s role has become dangerously ambiguous. (Painter Chuck) Close, speaking next, attempted to redirect the debate by arguing that the value of art is not determined by money at all (a point that earned him a ripple of applause) and that the ethics of its marketing were therefore somewhat moot. Even if its financial value can be manipulated, he argued, its long‐term significance comes from artists rather than buyers and sellers.

(British gallerist Michael) Hue‐Williams, just off the last plane from a snowbound Heathrow, steered things back to the nitty‐gritty with a recollection of having been stiffed on a potential big‐deal purchase in his early days. He added that the art market lacks transparency— pointing to the creation of auction rings aimed at boosting prices—and has no barriers to entry. (“To become an art dealer, you need to have a pulse.”) (Christie’s deputy chair Amy) Cappellazzo countered this with a theory (borrowed, characteristically, from economics) that the commonly agreed‐on preciousness of art ensures that behavior around it is

178 generally ethical.

Next to the podium, (“supercollector” Adam) Lindemann, a self‐described “consumptaholic,” began with a meandering comparison with the legal constraints on medical advertising, wondering why dealers aren’t subject to the same limitations as doctors if they really are more public servants than businesspeople. Pointing out that the art market depends on a type of dealing that might be considered “insider” in another field, he concluded, confusingly, “The whole system is ripe for anything to happen, and that’s the beauty of art and the art market.”

The decentralized and deregulated global art market has outsourced talent and production, gutted the art world’s “middle management,” produced an international financial infrastructure, focused wealth at the top, reduced labor costs, while encouraging a gutted labor market, and so on. In other words, the art market looks exactly like the global economy on a macro scale.

In his essay, Drucker peers out the rearview mirror to look through the lens of his own social topology, superimposed on which is Drucker’s social ecology. As we have seen, Peter Drucker evidently was projecting a view that he had determined to be good and meaningful that no longer exists, if it ever did.

The value of Drucker’s vision of Japan is what it tells us about Drucker. An ancillary finding might be this corrolary: It is not the reality that exists on either side and in front of us all, that an Epistemological projectionist throws. It is the movie starring the homunculus who lives behind the projectionist’s retina that we see.

Room for Expansion

For an expansion of the scope of narrative to address the global nature of artistic production possible now, one can look at the latest issue of THE Magazine Los Angeles (April 2009), as it relates to our subject for clarification.

In the Editor’s Notes, celebrated critic Peter Frank defines Western art thus:

“Still, it’s all art, i.e., stuff produced in the context of what we know as artistic discourse. That’s the Western definition, at any rate.”

Peter Frank is no less wrong than Peter Drucker, but for nearly opposite reasons. Frank continues:

“It’s not all good, not by a long shot; it’s not all important; it’s not all substantive; it’s not all worthwhile. But, for better or worse, it’s all art.”

179 What Peter Frank describes is not just the de‐definition of art (see Harold Rosenberg’s seminal text from 1983). He is describing the de‐regulation of art in a global context. On a College Art Association panel on the state of art criticism (February 2009), Frank pithily declared, “The art world is founded on conflicts of interest.”

One might ask then, in the manner of Drucker, what is the mission of art criticism? Who is its consumer, and what satisfaction is that consumer seeking?

It is up to us, who sustain the social topology, to define art criticism, to engage in it, to regulate its practice, to enforce its sentience, to insist that its prime focus be freedom. This task is dimensional.

>>>

On the cover of the April issue of THE is a reproduction of a detail of a painting by Moira Hahn, an LA‐based artist exhibiting recent work at Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City. She has appropriated the Japanese style and learned the techniques of Japanese painting.

>>> (Unfinished)

Matthiasson & Reischauer

Peter Drucker’s acumen, for assembling cogent models for managing organizations in the social, business or government sectors, is a function of knowledge of history, monitoring developments in the present and over time, practical experience, and discipline, among other things. In other words, Drucker’s expertise is a function of all‐at‐onceness, or dimensional thought.

In the Japan essay, Peter cites American Edwin O. Reischauer, “the former American ambassador to Japan and foremost authority on Japanese history and society,” and interprets Reischauer’s analysis of Japanese society to mean that Japan is “perceptual rather than conceptual,” when Reischauer claims that “Japan has never produced a great or original thinker of the first rank.”

I would interject here: The Japanese are, however, greatly and fundamentally sentient, as a people, and a people who make beautiful sentient things.

This is the essay’s critical moment, as it moves to a conclusion. As previously noted, Drucker is confusing the facets of seeing and doing. Perceiving, to capture something entirely, in the 20th Century is the job of the camera.

180 The Japanese, with all due politeness, are not the world champions in the perceiver category. The Inuit are. John Matthiasson, in his book Living on the Land, posits that this is probably an effect of the Inuit’s “long experience as hunters, and a couple of centuries of contact with puzzling and often frustrating outsiders” (Page 30).

What Western man perfected over 35 centuries, the Inuits perfected in less than two, adapting overnight to a new form of art that contained no requirements for Inuit stylizations. The Japanese have only learned that lesson, since World War II.

The caves of Chauvet demonstrate best in the Western history of art, the connection between vision, hunting and representation, especially of animals. This is a comparative subject that Drucker raises in his essay.

George Stubbs, one of the European artists Peter cites, dismissively, was the subject of a recent Getty survey exhibit. The comparison is unfair, as would be mine, if I were to suggest that Stubb’s often‐bizarre art bestiary could well withstand immediate juxtaposition with a contemporary Inuit representational sculpture, or even an interpretive one.

Stubbs was born a Liverpudlian, the son of a leather and hide merchant in the early 1700’s. He learned to paint horses by dissecting them. In other words, Stubb’s accomplishments as an artist arose from the study of dead things. His paintings reanimated them. Of course the artwork is as anesthetic as a lab, when compared to the sculpture or rendering of a tribal hunter.

I would suggest that Stubb’s process is similar to Drucker’s, in methodology. Dissection of a thing to learn about a thing is a prototypically European behavior. It is a foundation of modern medicine and science, as well as economics and other soft sciences like anthropology. Drucker’s social ecology relies on dead data, as much as it does on anything. It is the heart of society examined with a scalpel.

Further, I would suggest that we posit that Drucker on some level, at the time of the Japan essay’s composition, was striving to free himself from the constraints of “creative destruction,” hence his affection for the foreign approach of the Japanese artist. If Peter Drucker was any sort of hunter, he was a hunter of social solutions to the question of spiritual liberation, or at least personal freedom. This is sentience of the highest order.

Whether such a quarry is collectively obtainable is not clear, and certainly there is no one means that has satisfactorily been decided upon by all the world’s great thinkers to ensure freedom’s attainment for an individual within the organizational framework. Yet, the sentient man must make the attempt, for nothing else in the sentient world is more important – not art, not money, not power, not prestige, not history; nothing.

181 Drucker refers to Daruma, the founder of Ch’an Buddhism, which later was transformed by the Japanese into Zen. To compare Japanese Daruma paintings to the paintings by individual Western painters is to make the worst sort of interpretive mistake. We have explained the why of it.

Daruma paintings in the Japanese idiom have nothing to do with Egon Schiele, for instance. Schiele was not elaborating on any stylistic theme. He was fomenting a hybrid vehicle for emotional intensity coupled with a unique visual language incorporating the figure.

From a sentient perspective though Daruma and Schiele have everything to with each other (and with Drucker). All share sentience. The differences among the three pertain mainly to medium. Daruma’s were diversely spiritual and martial. Schiele was an artist. Drucker was an author, academic and commentator. Each medium is hugely important in social topology. Should they be talking about each other? Only Drucker had that option.

The artists of Europe Drucker points to all were engaged in the radical reassignment of the parameters of art in the West, utilizing whatever stylistic mechanism afforded them the strongest results. Picasso, for instance, refused any allegiance to any stylization or craft orientation, when it might interfere with his artistic evolution. Artistic evolution, in one aspect, is no different than martial evolution. The Spartan shield and short sword versus the Japanese Samurai sword: What is the point, beyond Epistemology, of comparing the two? In a dimensional analysis, it is a point of departure.

Drucker’s comparison of Expressionism of the West to anything in Japanese social topology is only relevant as a metric of shared sentience. The two classifications objectively do not culturally span, until very recently, but even then their coexistence manifests not in the ways Drucker suggests.

Let us visit upon the similarities, superficial though they may be. Speaking of Japanese and Western painting, the shared components of the two types of expression are paint and brush, substrate, plus the artists’ applied senses, craft or “hand,” and the awareness of their respective or prospective patrons: in other words, the most generic elements of art‐making. Structurally these components relate. They hardly do, beyond Greek formalism. A Japanese calligraphic brush is not an Italian or Austrian painter’s brush from the 1800s. Then there is sentience.

Picasso, Klimt and Monet were not illustrating the cultural narrative handed to them by an authority, as much as they were fixing new stylizations to relatively common experiences. The landscape, the cityscape, the historical picture, the still life, the nude, and the portrait: these are in no way new forms for European artists, when the 1880’s arrive. Of the three, Picasso was an aesthetic Hiroshima‐of‐One. He blew the whole canon up, much the way Pollack would do a few decades later. Without

182 Picasso, there is no Pollack. We could go on and on. The game is called, “Talk about art and artists (stream of sentience).”

Over the past 1000 years consumer profiles of art consumers, however, has changed enormously. It is interesting that Drucker, who famously demonstrated the capacity for industrial historical analysis, selectively discusses the profile of the Asian form of consumer, and fails to similarly address the ancient and dynamic linear thread of Western art’s economic and stylistic development, which is evidenced at least from the 13th Century. Drucker fails to examine the fascinating rise and fall of artist guilds in Europe, for instance, over the several centuries of the Renaissance, a transnational phenomenon exhibiting tremendous periods of innovation and entrepreneurial initiative.

We only have so much time.

Roots

In the century and a quarter that produced Picasso, Monet and Klimt, the European monarchies and aristocracy no longer exclusively determined the success of an individual artist. The emergent merchant class bought more art and fueled diversification of media in Europe than the crown and aristocracy. The “art and wonder cabinet” was the entertainment center of the era. While Europe’s cathedral altars were being adorned with precious metals from the mines of Peru in the preceeding period, and the armadas of Spain, France and England engaged in great seaborne conflagrations, the European middle class was engaged in an altogether new form of shared creative activity. Part science, part entertainment, part social aesthetic discourse, the private collection of exotic artifacts was replacing the tasteful art of the courts.

Peter Drucker as a youth witnessed firsthand the informal concourse of the new social order, as well as the great dissolutions of monarchical power in Europe. The First World War culminated a trajectory commenced in America and France, which the Second World War cemented. These events defined Drucker, his allegiances and direction, and provided the historical platform for his social ecology. On the distant shores of his America, Drucker was to confront firsthand the established mechanism for democratic free speech. From afar Democracy had sculpted Peter’s intellect, and the nation that embraced free speech first would provide Drucker safe haven from charismatic despots and repressive regimes. Fear of nuclear apocalypse aside, the next decades of Peter Drucker’s life would be dedicated to seeing the not‐yet‐visible through a window in a home in Claremont.

This is a romantic narrative. In a sentient world, it is somewhat correct.

183

O Austria!

Over the two or three centuries of European colonial conquest, the collections of traders expanded and diversified enormously, while those of the royalty acquired the patina of the historical. The accumulation of gold and silver through genocidal colonial practices in the New World and elsewhere re‐centered the politics and entirely reformatted the economies of European kingdoms.

As Fin de Siecle Vienna was producing Schiele and Klimt, and other artistic luminaries of the generation were gaining fame in Paris and elsewhere, Peter Drucker was growing up as the beneficiary of unprecedented European cultural freedom in one of its most enlightened cities. He left Austria for Germany in the inter‐war period to pursue his fortunes, only to be confronted by the rise to power of the Nazis.

Maybe Drucker’s personal history, relative to the tumultuous history to which he was witness, shaped his biases. This is only conjecture. That Vienna and the Austrian merchant or middle class experience over the span of a few decades formed Drucker, Freud and Hitler is a premise.

How differently each of these men interpreted the world in which he lived! Each had ideas about art, too. Regarding Hitler, one would only wish he had succeed as a painter. A more sentient medium might have mollified his potential for creative destruction. This is probably wishful thinking, as they say.

The social topology for the perceptual formation of Hitler, Freud and Drucker included Marxism, and American Democracy, and Capitalism, and a million other components. Each of these men shared one thing: sentience, or at least the potential for sentience. Making beautiful things is the one topological element they did not share.

As alluded to above, Peter Drucker said, “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.”

He also penned this gem: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.“

fin

184 CODA

THIS ESSAY WAS PERFORMED ON DEADLINE AS PRODUCTION‐PROOF (A/P PJM)

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