Olga Meerson (1877 - 1929 (suicide))

From The New York Times: “HILARY SPURLING, now basking in the glow of success for both her Matisse exhibition and Matisse books, said that she has "a short list of shows I should like to put on.” In a phone call from London, where she recently collected the Whitbread Book of the Year prize for her recent volume “Matisse the Master,” she said, “The one I’d really like to do is for Matisse’s best pupil, Olga Meerson.”

Meerson, a Russian-born émigré to Munich, where she studied with Kandinsky, and then to Paris, where she met Matisse, committed suicide in 1929. “Art history,” Ms. Spurling said, “has wiped her out completely.”

“I told her story in the book, and now I’d like to do her justice as a painter,” she continued.

Spurling’s exhibition of Meerson’s work would start with an enamel portrait, from 1901-02, that Meerson did of her sister-in-law, Katia Mann, Thomas Mann’s wife.

The exhibition would include two portraits from 1911. One is of her, by Matisse, which is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The other Meerson did of Matisse — his only known portrait, aside from photographs, Ms. Spurling said. In contrast to the photos, which show Matisse in a suit, looking very stuffy, “she painted him lying on a couch, relaxed as a cat,” Ms. Spurling added. The painting, which graced the cover of her recent volume in Britain, belongs to Meerson’s family.

Meerson’s Fauve work was largely derided in her time. But the portrait of Matisse was preparatory for a lost canvas that was praised by Guillaume Apollinaire when it was shown in 1911. It is also one of a handful of Meerson works Ms. Spurling has seen.

But Meerson earned her living as a portrait painter, and Ms. Spurling believes many more exist, probably in Munich and Berlin. While many works of art were lost or obliterated in the war, Ms. Spurling said, she is hopeful about rediscovering Meerson’s works. “I don’t think you destroy portraits,” Ms. Spurling said. “Several people have already come to me with works, and maybe you can help bring out more.”

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Portrait of Matisse by Olga Meerson.

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/36700

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WE HAVE DISCUSSED ART IN RELATION TO POLITICS FOR YEARS, ON THIS SITE... IT IS AN IMPORTANT SUBJECT AND WE HAVE TO REALISE THAT WE, ARTISTS, HAVE BUGGER CHANCES TO CHANGE THE POLITICAL LANSCAPE... RECOGNISED ARTISTS ARE PART OF THE ESTABLISHMENT. ALTERNATIVE (SAY SUBVERSIVE) ART IS A GAME OF US, I WAS GOING TO SAY MUGS, WHERE WE TRY HARD TO DEFINE A HIGHER MORAL VALUE TO OUR OWN EXISTENCE — AND TRY TO TAKE SOME OTHER PEOPLE ALONG THE JOURNEY. OR WE CAN PAINT PRETTY LANSCAPES WITH PURPLE TREES, TO BE "CONTROVERSIAL".

IF WE'RE NOT CAREFUL, WE CAN SOON BECOME PART OF THE "SYSTEM" OF COMMERCIAL VALUE WHERE ART LOSES ITS POTENCY — THAT OF EXPOSING THE DECEIT AND THE UNFAIRNESS OF THE SYSTEM... YES, ANDY PAINTED SOME LOVELY CANS OF SOUP. IMPRESSIVE BUT REVOLUTIONARY IN TERMS OF IMPROVING THE LIFE OF POOR PEOPLE? ZERO.

GEORGE GROSZ WAS ONE WHO CAME THE CLOSEST TO GRASPING THE ISSUE OF ART AS A WEAPON, YET HE FAILED TO DETHRONE HITLER. IT TOOK THE DEATHS OF MORE THAN 20 MILLION RUSSIANS AND THE DEATH OF A MILLION WESTERN TROOPS TO ACHIEVE THIS FEAT, THAT WE SHOULD CALL A DEFEAT — AS PRESENTLY, THE NEO-NAZIS HAVE RESURFACED IN UKRAINE, HELPED BY DO-GOODERS AND DELUDED PEACE LOVERS WHO CANNOT SEE THE WOOD FOR THE TREES, NOT REALISING THEY ARE DOING THE BIDDING OF THE EMPIRE AND THE CIA. RESULT? ART: ZERO, POLITICS: A ZILLION.

YET, DESPITE SUCH ART BEING CONSTANTLY DEFEATED BY THE LIES OF POLITICS, WE CAN'T GIVE UP. WE SHOULD NOT GIVE UP. AS AN ARTIST SINCE 1950 AND CARTOONING SINCE 1951, I AM STILL HITTING THE WALL WITH MY HEAD. THE WALL DOES NOT BUDGE. WE WON'T BE GIVEN AN HONOURABLE MENTION FOR EXPOSING THE DECEIT OF THE CROOKED BIDENS, NOT UNTIL THE "MAIN-STREAM MEDIA DE MEDIOCRE MERDIA" SEES THE LIGHT — OR SEE MONETARY VALUE IN EXPOSING THE DEEDS. EVEN THE MURDOCH MEDIA IS STILL BEING IGNORED ON THIS ISSUE DESPITE HAVING EXPOSED THE CROOKERIES. NOT EVEN THE US SENATE HEARINGS MAKE IT TO THE FRONT PAGE. 

SO WHAT HOPE IS THERE FOR US?

ZILTCH. YET WE HAVE TO PUSH ON... BECAUSE WE ARE NOT ALONE, BUT WE ARE OVERWHELMED BY SEVERAL MILLIONS TO ONE... WE PUSH FOR PEACE AGAINST A MASSIVE SYSTEM GEARED FOR WARS — MILITARY AND ECONOMIC....

WE STILL HAVE TO MAINTAIN OUR DIGNITY OF BEING TRUE, WHEN MOST PEOPLE HAVE BEEN CAPTURED BY THE COMFORTABLE NET OF LIES.... MEANWHILE, AS WE DO NOT DECIDE THE GREATER SOCIAL FUTURE WHICH IS RAINED ON US FROM THE TOP, WE CAN MICRO-MANAGE LITTLE OASIS OF TRUTH....

2023 marks the 70th anniversary of one of the world’s most famous borders: The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a strip of land running across the Korean Peninsula near the 38th parallel north, dividing it roughly in half.

It was established to serve as a buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea. What divides the two countries is not just the physical border but its immeasurable effects on their political, military and diplomatic sectors. We cannot see or describe them in words but can sense their existence affecting past, present, and future.

For over 10 years, Korean curator SunJung Kim has been working on the REAL DMZ PROJECT, a contemporary art and research project focused on the DMZ and border area issues. At the Basel Peace Forum, we invite SunJung Kim and fellow artists to the exhibition’s vernissage to discuss borders' role in contemporary arts.

With Sunjung Kim (Artistic Director), Kyungah Ham (Contemporary Artist), Noh Suntag (Artist), Joongho Yum (Artist). Moderated by Laurent Goetschel (Director of swisspeace and the Basel Peace Forum).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-2Qrt0LkEs

MEANWHILE, ON THE GREATER SCALE, LEADERS OF LARGER NATIONS CAN SHOW NEW "INTERESTING" VENTURES AND PURPOSES... SAY XI AND PUTIN. THEY MAY NOT BE PERFECT, BUT THEY COULD BE MORE INSPIRING AWAY FROM A TIRED CRASS DECEITFUL AMERICAN HEGEMONY WHICH HAS KILLED FAR TOO MANY PEOPLE SO FAR FOR SELFISH INTERESTS ONLY.

SO, DO WE GO ALONG OUR MERRY WAY TOWARDS "UNIQUE" ARTISTIC OBLIVION IN OUR LITTLE CORNER — OR DO WE HELP EMERGING IDEAS, COMPETING IDEAS, USING OUR SKILLS (CRUMMY CARTOONING OR OTHERWISE) FOR REASONABLE CRITICS OF THE PRESENT HUMAN LEADERSHIP?

I HOPE I HAVE ANSWERED THIS, SO FAR ON THIS SITE. 

The emerging new always both frightens and inspires the fading old. History is that unity of opposites. Sharp-edged rejections of what is new clash with enthusiastic celebrations of it. The old gets pushed away even as bitter denials of that reality surge. The emerging new world economy displays just such contradictions. Four major developments can illustrate them and underscore their interactions.

First, the neoliberal globalising paradigm is now the old. Economic nationalism is the new. It is another reversal of their previous positions. Driven by its celebrated profit motive, capitalism in its old centres (western Europe, North America, and Japan) invested increasingly elsewhere: where labor power was far cheaper; markets were growing faster; ecological constraints were weak or absent; and governments better facilitated rapid accumulation of capital. Those investments brought big profits back into capitalism’s old centres, whose stock markets boomed and thus their income and wealth inequalities widened (since the richest Americans own the great bulk of securities). Even faster was the economic growth unleashed after the 1960s in what quickly became capitalism’s new centres (China, India, and Brazil). That growth was further enhanced by the arrival of the capital relocated from the old centres. Capitalism’s dynamic had earlier moved its production centre from England to the European continent, then on to North America and Japan. That same profit-driven dynamic took it to mainland Asia and beyond during the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries.

Neoliberal globalisation in theory and practice both reflected and justified this relocation of capitalism. It celebrated the profits and growth brought to both private and state-owned/operated enterprises around the world. It downplayed or ignored the other sides of globalisation: (1) growing income and wealth inequalities inside most countries; (2) the shift of production from old to new centres of capitalism; and (3) faster growth of output and markets in new centres than old centres. These changes shook the old centres’ societies. Middle classes there atrophied and shrank as good jobs moved increasingly to capitalism’s new centres. The old centres’ employer classes used their power and wealth to maintain their social positions. Indeed, they got richer by harvesting the greater profits rolling in from the new centres.

However, neoliberal globalisation proved disastrous for most employees in capitalism’s old centres. In the latter, the employer class not only grabbed rising profits, but also offloaded the costs of the decline of capitalism’s old centres onto employees. Tax cuts for business and the wealthy, stagnant or declining real wages (abetted by immigration), “austerity” reductions of public services, and neglect of infrastructure produced widening inequality. Working classes across the capitalist West were shocked out of the delusion that neoliberal globalisation was the best policy for them too. Rising labor militancy across the U.S., like mass uprisings in France and Greece and left political shifts across the Global South, entail rejections of neoliberal globalisation and its political and ideological leaders. Beyond that, capitalism itself is being shaken, questioned, and challenged. In new ways, projects for going beyond capitalism are again on the historical agenda despite the status quo’s efforts to pretend otherwise.

Second, over recent decades, the intensifying problems of neoliberal globalisation forced capitalism to make adjustments. As neoliberal globalisation lost mass support in capitalism’s old centres, governments took on powers and made more economic interventions to sustain the capitalist system. In short, economic nationalism rose to replace neoliberalism. Instead of the old laissez-faire ideology and policies, nationalist capitalism rationalised the state’s expanding power. In capitalism’s new centres, enhanced state power produced economic development that markedly outgrew the old centres. The new centres’ recipe was to create a system in which a large sector of private enterprises (owned and operated by private individuals) coexisted with a large sector of state enterprises owned by the state and operated by its officials. Instead of a mostly private capitalist system (like that of the U.S. or UK) or a mostly state capitalist system (like that of the USSR), places like China and India produced hybrids. Strong national governments presided over coexisting large private and state sectors to maximise economic growth.

Both private and state enterprises and their coexistence deserve the label “capitalist.” That is because both organise around the relationship of employers and employees. In both private and state enterprises/systems, a small employer minority dominates and controls a large employee majority. After all, slavery also often displayed coexisting private and state enterprises that shared the defining master-slave relationship. Likewise, feudalism had private and state enterprises with the same lord-serf relationship. Capitalism does not disappear when it displays coexisting private and state enterprises organised around the same employer-employee relationship. Thus we do not conflate state capitalism with socialism. In the latter, a different, non-capitalist economic system displaces the employer-employee organisation of workplaces in favour of a democratic workplace community organisation as in worker cooperatives. The transition to socialism in that sense is also a possible outcome of the turmoil today surrounding the formation of a new world economy.

The state-private hybrid in China achieves remarkably high and enduring GDP and real-wage growth rates that have continued now over the last 30 years. That success deeply influences economic nationalisms everywhere to move toward that hybrid as a model. Even in the U.S., competition with China becomes the go-to excuse for massive governmental interventions. Tariff wars—that raised domestic taxes—could be enthusiastically endorsed by politicians who otherwise preached laissez-faire ideology. The same applied to government-run trade wars, government targeting of specific corporations for punishment or bans, government subsidies to whole industries as so many anti-China economic ploys.

Third, over recent decades, the U.S. empire peaked and began its decline. It thus follows every other empire’s (Greek, Roman, Persian, and British) classic pattern of birth, evolution, decline, and death. The U.S. empire emerged from and replaced the British Empire over the last century and especially after World War II. Earlier, in 1776 and again in 1812, the British Empire tried and failed militarily to prevent or stop an independent U.S. capitalism from developing. After those failures, Britain took a different path in its relations with the U.S. After many more wars in its colonies and with competing colonialisms across the 19th and 20th centuries, Britain’s empire is now gone.

The question is whether the U.S. has learned or even can learn the key lesson of Britain’s imperial decline. Or will it keep trying military means, ever more desperately and dangerously, to hold on to a global hegemonic position that relentlessly declines? After all, the U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were all lost. China has now replaced the U.S. as the major peacemaker in the Middle East. The days of the U.S. dollar as the supreme global currency are numbered. U.S. supremacy in high-tech industries must already be shared with China’s high-tech industries. Even major U.S. corporate CEOs such as Apple’s Tim Cook and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce want the profits of more trade and investment flows between the U.S. and China. They look with dismay at the Biden administration’s rising politically driven hostilities directed at China.

Fourth, the U.S. empire’s decline raises the question of what comes next as the decline deepens. Is China the emerging new hegemon? Will it inherit the empire mantle from the U.S. as the U.S. took it from Britain? Or will some multinational new world order emerge and shape a new world economy? The most interesting possibility and perhaps the likeliest is that China and the entire BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) grouping of nations will undertake the construction and maintenance of a new world economy. The war in Ukraine has already enhanced the prospects of such an outcome by strengthening the BRICS alliance. Many other countries have applied or will soon apply for entry into the BRICS framework. Together, they have the population, resources, productive capacity, connections, and accumulated solidarity to be a new pole for world economic development. Were they to play that role, the remaining parts of the world from Australia and New Zealand to Africa, Europe, and South America would have to rethink their foreign economic and political policies. Their economic futures depend in part on how they navigate the contest between old and new world economic organisations. Those futures likewise depend on how critics and victims of both neoliberal/globalising capitalism and nationalist capitalism interact inside all nations.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Republished from COUNTER PUNCH April 17, 2023

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For the last eight months people have been expressing frustration and confusion about the reluctance of celebrities to use their immense platforms to speak out against the U.S.-backed slaughter in Gaza. But it’s not really a mystery why this happens: celebrities are reluctant to criticize the U.S.-centralized empire because they benefit from it directly.

It’s actually a very important aspect of imperial narrative-control how all of our society’s largest and most influential voices are intimately dependent on the political status quo upon which the empire is built. 

Fame and fortune come as a result of being elevated by the wealthy owners of media production platforms like film studios, record labels, TV and news media, and those extremely wealthy people have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo upon which their wealth is premised. 

Those who are threatening to the status quo are therefore not elevated to celebrity status, and the ones who get rich and famous either (A) understand this acutely or (B) are too shallow and vapid to have any interest in rocking the imperial boat.

Nobody becomes a superstar all on their own; it requires an extensively collaborative relationship with many individuals, and many of the most important of these are in positions of great wealth and power and have no desire to see socialism or anti-imperialism threaten their kingdoms by gaining a foothold in the political realities of their nation. This creates an impressively thorough gatekeeping system which filters out any clear-eyed rebels who might otherwise shine their way to the top.

Of course the filtration system isn’t perfect; sometimes someone sneaks through, or, more likely, is waved through and then has a political awakening after achieving stardom. 

But for every Susan Sarandon and Roger Waters there are a hundred enthusiastic celebrity supporters of the status quo, and a thousand others who just stay silent on all matters of real importance.

Just making someone a multimillionaire and giving them a cushy lifestyle is enough to make them loyal to the political status quo of the land. 

The mere fact that the empire is capitalist and allows the wealthy to live like gods ensures that most people who ascend to stardom will be heavily biased in favor of the system which allows for that lifestyle, and everything they say publicly will reflect this. 

This gives the empire a massive propaganda bullhorn which creates an information landscape where all the biggest voices speak as though the system is working perfectly, and the voices of all the ordinary people whose experience tells them otherwise are drowned out.

When Macklemore rapped about how “the music industry’s quiet, complicit in their platform of silence” about Gaza, he asked, “What happened to the artist? What d’you got to say?” And this is the answer. 

What happened to the most influential artists is that they stand too much to gain from supporting the status quo politics of the empire, and stand too much to lose by opposing it. 

And that’s why the mainstream “artists” of today are so artless. How much depth and profundity can you express if you’re compartmentalizing away from reality like that? How authentic and meaningful can your art be while you are duty bound to help preserve the status quo of a mind-controlled dystopia where everything is fraudulent and meaningless? 

Everything that draws human beings to art in the first place needs to be sacrificed to retain celebrity status ?— ?truthfulness, sincerity, rebelliousness, sensuality, inspiration, aliveness. That wild connection with something mysterious and strangely sexy which crackles just below the surface of everything. 

All that needs to be flushed down the toilet to become a celebrity guardian of the information interests of the globe-spanning U.S.-centralized empire. You’ll live like a king, but you’ll also have to sacrifice everything inside you that makes life worth living.

We are ruled by weird, phony freaks in Washington and Virginia who collaborate with weird, phony freaks at the top of the corporate world, and their rule is enforced by weird, phony freaks in New York and Los Angeles who use their celebrity status to help create an artificial mainstream culture that is mindless, heartless, soulless, and completely uninterested in the emergence of a healthy world.

That is why celebrities are silent on Gaza today.

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au 

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/30/caitlin-johnstone-the-silence-of-the-artists/

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