secretaries of state

The Society of the Spectacle. Pseudo events. The event becomes at best, an entertaining adjunct to the advertising and fundraising. The event is depersonalized and used to move product; stripped of its subjective meaning, the message becomes tailored to stimulate the sale of swag, mugs, pens etc. Pseudo events and pseudo experience where any elements of the spontaneous becomes simulated and scripted into the performance. The false self with false experience.

( see link at end) …Flanked by a group of millionaires and their secretaries, Obama hit for another consecutive day on themes of fairness and the need for this rule, which would see million dollar household subjected to a minimum effective tax rate of 30 percent.

---The White House could have chosen any profession to highlight, but in many ways, administrative assistants are the perfect foil for a caricature of the uber-rich, tax-avoiding millionaire. So how are secretaries doing? According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are just under 2 million secretaries in the United States. They make an average of $15.87 an hour, or $33,020 a year. That's well below the $45,000 per year average across all occupations. But executive assistants can earn much higher salaries -- averaging $23.13 an hour, or $48,120 per year. The top 10% of executive assistants bring in an average of $70,020.---Read More:http://economy.money.cnn.com/2012/04/11/obamas-army-of-tax-paying-secretaries/

“Most Americans agree with me, so do most millionaires. One survey found that two-thirds of millionaires support this idea. So do nearly half of all Republicans across America,” Obama said, speaking to an audience of millionaires and their secretaries, intended to personify Warren Buffett’s contention that millionaires should pay at least the same tax rates as their secretaries….Read More:http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/11/11142158-obama-flanked-by-millionaires-renews-push-for-buffett-rule?lite

Sean Lennon. Occupy Wall Street,---The popular view of aesthetic judgment is dominated by what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "the ideology of natural taste." According to this view, the difference between beautiful and ugly, tasteful and vulgar, stylish and tacky, resides in the object. Bad art really is bad, it's just that only people with a certain background and education are able to recognize it as such. Yet, as Bourdieu points out, this ability to detect bad art is distributed in an almost miraculously class-specific fashion. In fact, only a tiny percentage of the population has it. And as Bourdieu documents quite exhaustively, this capacity is almost entirely concentrated among the high-status members in society.--- Read More:http://www.damncoolpictures.com/2011/10/celebrities-joins-occupy-wall-street.html

Postmodern political events are not much different than art happenings, sport events and other pieces of the industrial entertainment complex; the market economy. Here, with Obama’s millionaires, a sort of reality television where the spectators become part of the spectacle.Not too different that Yves Klein’s management of an art opening, another pseudo-event, where the only works on exhibition, representation, were the invited audience who were quite gratified to be able to exhibit themselves,and be a bit degraded by being “on sale” as it is, since by becoming part of the spectacle they were also becoming marketable as celebrities, totally created by the media, noted or their image and trademark, as opposed to a “hero” who is distinctive in terms of achievement and is self-created.


---to Yves Klein, the photograph above shows him pushing the boundaries of art by painting with fire, with a fireman and hose at the ready. What we see in this photograph is not so much an exploration of the Readymade but rather a manic explosion of possibilities in terms of the media acceptable as “art”. Confronted with the power of fire oil paint starts to appear a little tame. But as we shall see more clearly later, Klein was not only adding the medium of fire to that of paint, he was also introducing a performative dimension to the activity of “painting”. The once integral medium of painting starts to undergo a deconstructive process of splitting and dis-integrating into new mediums. .---Read More:http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=497

Klein’s exhibition of the spectator, and embedding of the spectator into the theatrical space of the spectacle ,  postmodern  art, is like Obama’s citizen engagement, millionaire engagement, town hall style campaigning and art museum happenings with Bruce Nauman for example, make Obama a hero of the spectacle, an art celebrity or just a big name?  A type of Warhol inflated by hype and publicity into a big name? Everything in the media today appears as part of a larger psychotic spectacle, where the experience of spontaneous events is buried, enmeshed in pseudo events all socially manufactured and ordained; a spectacle triumphing over reality by simulating and subverting its significance meaning not much to separate Miley Cyrus, Chris Hedges in Zuccotti Park or Obama on the stump.  Its not simply a theatre of the absurd,mainstream Alfred Jarry,  but breaking beyond the boundary of absurdity, an absurdity that has its own reality;  the postmodern condition, our daily theatre that is  spectacle has no pretense of addressing reality, just more recourse to  psychotic entertainment. What is the difference with Obama and the secretaries and the static mannequins of a Vanessa Beecroft installation, however scripted the former and naked the latter. All glamorized robots,  depersonalized  individuals and  theatrical appearances.

---The intersection of painting and performance attained a pinnacle on 9 March 1960 when Klein, through the Comte d’Arquian organised a remarkable “Action Spectacle”, in d’Arquian’s salon 253 rue Sainte-Honoré, Paris. From a standpoint at the turn of the millennium it is extremely curious that this event was very formal, black tie in fact. But it was a radical episode in the history of art that indicates, like the other instances we have seen in this essay, the beginning of postmodern art. ... Returning to Klein’s Action-Spectacle, it can be seen in the photograph that Klein covered the floor of d’Arquian’s salon with very large sheets of paper on which he placed buckets of YKB paint. Various naked women covered the front of their body with the blue paint and applied it more or less vigorously to the paper. The Action-Spectacle was a practical demonstration of how Klein produced his ANT (Anthropometry) series of paintings;---Read More:http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=497

ADDENDUM:

…Republicans have called the Buffett Rule a red herring, pointing to the fact that the law, if enacted, would only make a small dent in the deficit. Obama acknowledged that the rule would only raise


ut $47 billion over 10 years, but, he said, just because it doesn’t singlehandedly close the deficit doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be enacted. Read More:http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/11/11142158-obama-flanked-by-millionaires-renews-push-for-buffett-rule?lite

---Vaness Beecroft. Read More:http://kherlak.blogspot.ca/2011/06/vanessa-beecroft.html

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