Category: Art

Screaming NYU Protester Woman Identified as Anti-Trump Porn ‘Artist’

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The highlight of Thursday’s protest against Gavin McInnes’s appearance at New York University was a woman who screeched at the police:

Who’s protecting NYU from this bulls**t? Why are you here? You’re not here to protect these students from Nazis. No, you’re not! This is completely f***ed up. And these students had to f***ing face them on their own. You should be ashamed of yourselves! You should be standing up to those Nazis! You should be protecting students from hate! This is hate! These are f***ing assholes . . . you are a joke. You’re grown boys! You’re grown boys . . . and I’m disgusted! I’m a professor! How dare you! How dare you f***ing assholes protect neo-Nazis? F*** you! F*** you! F*** you! These are kids who are trying to learn about humanity! They’re trying to learn about human rights and against racism and xenophobia and LGBTQ rights, and you’re letting these f***ing neo-Nazis near here! You should kick their ass! You should! You should be ashamed of yourselves! You should! F*** that s**t. F*** that s**t. It’s not up to these students to kick the ass of a neo-Nazi! They don’t have to raise their fist! They were taught to be peaceful! F*** you! F*** you. I’m a professor. God f***ing damn it … you’re here to protect neo-Nazis! So f*** you! God f***ing damn it! Those kids should not have to take fists up to neo-Nazis, and you’re putting them in that situation! Go to hell. F*** you NYPD!

Click here to watch the video of her unhinged meltdown.

In case you lost count, that was 16 F-bombs in less than two minutes, and she twice identified herself as a professor, prompting curiosity as to whether she taught at NYU and what subject. However, online investigators say she is in fact an artist named Rebecca Goyette, an adjunct professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

 

Professor Boyette’s online biography:

Rebecca Goyette creates persona-based works that poke holes in Puritanical sexual mores. . . .
Situated within a largely queer, fantasy paradigm, her work is able to embrace a fruitful multiplicity of sexual desire and engage a panoply of non normative gender roles. . . .
For Goyette, sex is one gateway into the rich territory of psychology and human interaction, into the remotest ranges of the subconscious mind.

Well, her subconscious mind is definitely a non-normative panoply, eh?

Works in Professor Goyette’s “queer, fantasy” oeuvre include “Lobstapussy,” “F–k Platter,” “Ghost Bitch” and “Masshole.”

 

It appears that “non-normative” is a synonym for crazy and, if you suspect that Professor Goyette’s mental illness is hereditary, you might not be surprised to learn that she claims to be the descendant of a woman who was hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692:

Goyette, haunted by the horrific tale of her ancestor’s death, has long dreamed of making an artwork in her honor. Her summer exhibition at Freight and Volume marks the realization of said dream. Of course, as those familiar with Goyette’s radical feminist practice might have anticipated, this will be no orthodox tribute. Rather, to honor her martyred ancestor, Goyette made a pornography. . . .
The Salem witch trials, Goyette explained in an interview with The Huffington Post, were fueled, above all else, by an erratic hatred and fear of feminine power. A panic had spread amongst the Puritan pilgrims, who became suspicious of sexuality, empowerment, and the other, leading little white men in tall black hats to accuse over 200 individuals of witchcraft, when their only crime, much of the time, was standing out.
Though the trials officially ended in 1693, the odious assumptions that permitted them still persist today, manifested in various forms of sexism, xenophobia and racism. “Donald Trump is the perfect pilgrim,” Goyette said, “he’s spewing all kinds of hate. He has the freedom to do whatever but he imposes arbitrary rules onto everyone else.”
Goyette believed the best way to send a big “f–k you” to pilgrims past and present, who go to wildly unconscionable lengths to silence otherness in all its forms, was to make an irreverent, nasty, hilarious, empowering feminist porno.

How many times must we refute this feminist myth of witchcraft as “empowerment”? After feminists seized upon this theme in the 1970s, they enjoyed several years of unimpeded myth-making, with Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Barbara Ehrenreich and others cobbling together a narrative composed of a cherry-picked selection of fact woven together by theories of women’s intuitive nature and male oppression. Feminist “research” included picking through 19th-century works by such authors as the anti-Catholic French writer Jules Michelet (La Sorcière, 1862) and the anti-Christian suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage (Woman, Church and State, 1893). Michelet was the primary source of the claim that witches were skilled practitioners of the healing arts, possessed of an arcane knowledge of herbal medicine, who were wrongly persecuted by an envious Catholic hierarchy. Gage was the source for the claim that 9 million women were killed during three centuries of witch hunts. There is no actual evidence for Michelet’s claim, however, and reputable historians now estimate the actual number of witchcraft executions in Europe as 100,000 or less, and at least a quarter of the victims were male, so that Gage’s number was a 90-fold exaggeration.

Unfortunately, by the time serious scholars began debunking these feminist claims in the 1990s — I highly recommend Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft — the mythology of the witch as an “empowered” woman had acquired a vast bibliography produced by Women’s Studies professors. Long on theory and short on facts, this ideological myth-making had taken root in academia, so that every October, we find journalists cranking out Halloween-themed articles that recycle the feminist witch narrative.

This is not merely coincidental to Rebecca Goyette’s insane rage. Her “art” is a sort of pornographic “queer, fantasy” cosplay, with her “non-normative” expressions of perverse sexuality intended to challenge the alleged misogyny and “puritanical” fear of sex that are peddled as historical truth by the feminist witchcraft myth:

Goyette addresses the seeds of hatred and fear that have prevented America, in her opinion, from becoming truly great. She does so in a feminine language all her own, where trauma and desire are not mutually exclusive, but wound up in the same, messy psychosexual playground.

As I explained last April: “Feminists have long understood, far better than most of their opponents, that destroying Christianity is necessary to feminism’s success.” This project seeks to impose on society a new feminist “morality” that is a neo-Gnostic inversion of scripture:

A blasphemous denial of God’s sovereignty and righteousness, Gnosticism rejected the idea of Original Sin and thus rejected also the significance of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. If humans are sinless, we need no Savior, and what is necessary instead is for humans to get in touch with their inner divinity, to “become part of the universal whole by a process of self-knowledge and self-realization,” as Professor Peter Jones explained in his 1992 book The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age.

Making “self-knowledge” the basis of religious truth, of course, is entirely consistent with the feminist claim that “the personal is political.” The result of this self-obsessed worldview is not only Rebecca Goyette’s obscene adventures in the “messy psychosexual playground,” but also her shrieking irrational rage toward Trump supporters.

In February 2016, Professor Goyette produced “Trump/Palin Performance Art Rally,” a work of political obscenity, and her partner in that performance, artist Brian Andrew Whiteley, subsequently produced a Donald Trump grave stone in Central Park, which earned Whitely a visit from the Secret Service, and also, free publicity.

Did I forget to mention that Professor Goyette’s “Ghost Bitch” exhibit included her fantasies of castrating a certain Republican?

A highlight of the exhibition, the video aptly entitled Ghost Bitch U.S.A., couples Ghost Bitch with none other than misogynistic, fear-mongering (presumptive) Presidential candidate Donald Trump. We see Trump bound to a tree, allowing Ghost Bitch to have his way with him, ultimately leading up to his castration.

 

 

“Fear and Loathing of the Penis” is, as I have said, the psychological inspiration of feminist ideology and, also, bad feminist art.



 

 

What Canadians Consider ‘Art’

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This painting — a crude and childish cartoon that would not deserve praise if it had been done by an fifth-grader — was part of an “art” project in Toronto that was funded by Canadian taxpayers.

M. Joseph Sheppard called attention to this project, a “lesbian haunted house” that was open to the public last month. It was intended as a parody of the “Hell Houses” that some evangelical churches sponsor as a didactic alternative to secular Halloween haunted houses.

What is important to know is that the “Hell House” phenomenon was organic in its origins: Some Christian youth leaders saw that young people were flocking to gory commercial spook houses and decided to create events that would teach moral lessons in the same way. It doesn’t matter whether you embrace the message, or approve of how the message was delivered; the point is that the church-sponsored “Hell House” is a voluntary activity conducted at private expense.

However, there was neither commercial demand nor voluntary support sufficient to bring into existence the lesbian haunted house in Toronto, so it could only be funded by coercive action of government:

Allyson Mitchell, the artist behind “A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House,” has received thousands in government grants.
Acknowledgment is posted on the outside of the rented location at 303 Lansdowne Ave., also called Killjoy Kastle, that funding was provided by the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council (OAC) and Canadian Council for the Arts. The artist undertook her work in collaboration with the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU).
Mitchell refused to discuss the funding for her project. . . .
Research shows the AGYU received $55,000 from the City of Toronto so far in 2013.
The Canadian Council for the Arts 2013 allotments are not yet available but documents show Mitchell was granted $20,000 in 2011 from the council and a total of $61,000 since 2005.

This type of subsidized bohemianism — épater la bourgeoisie at taxpayer expense — is most effective as an argument against government funding for art. Like “green energy,” if there were any market demand for this stuff, there would be no need to subsidize it.

Allyson Mitchell is the Solyndra of the art world.

You will perhaps not be surprised that this celebration of artistic failure was applauded by its intended audience of socialists:

As a female, queer tax payer who enjoys this kind of “deviant” art (oh my!), I’m happy the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council funded this project. Their funding allowed for free entry into the haunted house so that everyone, no matter their income, could access the art inside.

Oh, I see: If it weren’t for these government “arts councils,” the pleasures of “deviant” art might only be available to the rich. And I’m sure that the impoverished children of inner-city Toronto were edified and uplifted by Allyson Mitchell’s exhibit. She gets tens of thousands of dollars annually, and the starving kids get . . . art.

M. Joseph Sheppard confesses his mystification:

But, leaving aside the Palin Derangement Syndrome the fact that there exists on this planet a “lesbian haunted house” is a marvel of our age and something to be wondered at. What it means in the broader context of society — well I have absolutely no idea but it must mean something, perhaps you can puzzle it out!

I’ve done my best, Joe, and let me make one final point: The image at the top of the page was shamelessly swiped from the aforesaid Female Queer Canadian, an act of expropriation I can justify because (a) the painting itself was not hers, (b) a work commissioned at taxpayer expense is arguably public domain, and also (c) fuck Canada.

 

Stein to the Drunken Lefties

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by Smitty

The free-spending Lefties here,
As the drunk on a beer
Bender for fortnight or more,
Knowing hangover in store,
Bangs his hogshead in vain,
Wishing ’twere full again.
Raging ‘gainst coming of dawn,
When the light of the sun falls upon
The heart of man in full rut;
Hedonism fills his. But
He can’t make beer from piss,
For carnal bureaucratic bliss,
Must give way to the maul,
Hammering the head until all
Thought of Socialism is purged
And the name of the one who urged
The entitlement orgy’s reviled,
And thoughts return to the child,
Who somehow knew right from wrong;
Good poetry from banal song.
Gratification, delayed, that built mind.
He looks up from his puke-puddle to find
A brief Herbert Stein phrase,
That pierces his drunken daze
The way that a mother’s don’t:
“Trends that can’t continue, won’t.”
–CLS 21Oct2013

Category: Art

Our Own Corner Of The Library

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— by Wombat-socho


I’ve been a science fiction reader for most of my life, starting with a copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time I was given in second grade and continuing on through Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels to Asimov, Silverberg and other grand masters. I’m old enough to remember when the artsy-fartsy “New Wave” introduced annoying literary styles and gratuitous sex to the genre, and the larger cultural change that made science fiction and fantasy acceptable – no longer something to be sneered at by critics or your classmates.
We’re now at a point where, as Thomas Disch remarked, “we’ve won the culture war”, and millions of people line up to pay perfectly good money to see a movie that reboots a TV series that was originally a ratings failure – but a cult classic.


What’s interesting to me is that with occasional exceptions, SF has largely been dominated by socialist or technocratic futures, mostly because it’s been written by authors who want to write about such futures either because they’re inclined that way (Isaac Asimov) or explicitly socialists (John Brunner, Charles Stross). One subgenre of SF, though – and one publishing house in particular that specializes in that genre – tends to be dominated by conservative and libertarian writers, much as country music tends to be dominated by singers and bands unafraid to express their patriotism and love of country. I’m referring, of course, to combat SF, from which Baen Books has made a fair amount of money. One might almost consider Baen the Fox News of SF publishing: they provide a place for fiction that’s not even remotely PC enough for the other publishers.


The question I want to throw out to the readers is this: is there something about military SF that attracts conservative and libertarian authors? Does writing what you know explain why a lot of Baen’s authors who write in this subgenre are veterans? Where do technothrillers fit into this? Why doesn’t Baen have a booth at CPAC? 😉


A Post Which Tries To Capture The Absurdity Of The Cain Situation In A Way That Some May Find Sacrilegious

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by Smitty

15. Now at that Election Cycle, the Media was wont to release unto the #OWS people a prisoner, whom they would.
16. And they had then a notable prisoner, called Barabbas.
17. Therefore when they were gathered together in Zuccotti Park, the Media said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Herman which is called Cain?
18. For he knew that for envy they had delivered him, pulling rumors like rabbits out of a turban so fast that no sane person could track them all, much less formulate a response for why he is labeled by some a Wookie from planet Endor.
19. When the Media was set down on the judgment seat, its conscience sent unto it, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.
20. But the chief consultants and donors persuaded the #OWS multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Herman, who had been known to speak to women on Endor, and was rumored to have appeared as Chewbacca at a Halloween party, some said.
21. The Media answered and said unto them, Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you? They said, Barabbas.
22. The Media saith unto them, What shall I do then with Herman which is called Cain? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified, for we fear he is a Wookie.
23. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified, for who would accuse an innocent man of hanging around Endor?
24. When the Media saw that it could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made by #OWS, it took water, and washed its hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it, and blame Bush.

You Don’t Do Champagne Work On A Kool-Aid Budget

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by Smitty

I completely understand Ladd Ehlinger’s point here. When you’re trying to accomplish something artistic, tools do matter. As ancient commenter Solomon noted:

If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct. Eccl10:10

And why waste wisdom overcoming tool deficiencies, unless that itself is part of the art? All this is to say: Ladd has a point.

So, the bazillion dollar question is: how does one go from dead 0 to auteur? Jerry Pournelle has noted that, as a writer, you throw away your first million words. What is the corresponding duration of film, one wonders? Then again, some say you never ‘arrive’, to note Buddy Rich:

Late in his life, Buddy Rich was asked if he considered himself the world’s greatest drummer, and he gave an inspiring reply: “Let’s put it this way: I have that ambition. You don’t really attain greatness. You attain a certain amount of goodness, and if you’re really serious about your goodness, you’ll keep trying to be great. I have never reached a point in my career where I was totally satisfied with anything I’ve ever done, but I keep trying.”

One of the ironies of education, I’ve found, is that the best learning comes while teaching. That is, the effort required to translate some knowledge from my head to that of another has a massive clarifying effect.

But we often start with that Kool-Aid budget. And I submit that quite a few problems are heuristic in nature: you’ve just got to drink some Kool-Aid prototypes just to understand the problem enough to undertake the champagne work. At the risk of sounding a teeny bit Freudean, I was raised by such a perfectionist mother that she would regularly avoid trying things, knowing that the result would be sub-champagne. A major part of growing up was forgiving her that.

Maybe if you’re Mozart, you can toss off a Symphony #40 as Zeus toss out Athena from his brow:
For the rest of us, the process of elimination will have to do. And if a Kool-Aid budget is what you got, well, you go to art with the budget you have, not the budget you wish you had, to mangle Rumsfeld.

Update: linked by That Mr. G Guy.

Tuning Up the World’s Smallest Violin, Ready to Play ‘My Heart Bleeds for You’

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“Little attention is being paid to the way our continuing economic crisis is hitting artists, intellectuals, musicians, and writers, [Scott] Timberg argues. And he suggests that the way those livings are collapsing has put the lie to the idea that the 21st century American economy would be pleasantly post-industrial, an interchange of valuable information by individuals set free by computers and technology to gather in cool places. Reality is harder, and poorer, he writes.”
— Ted Mann, “Is the Creative Class Evaporating?”

Wait a minute, while I think about all the real suffering in the world.

OK, there.

Now, wait a minute (or perhaps longer) while I try to work up some sympathy for members of the “creative class” whose fate Scott Timberg bemoans in what Mann calls a “provocative essay” at Salon:

“It’s sort of like job growth in Texas,” says Joe Donnelly, a former deputy editor at L.A. Weekly, laid off in 2008 and now pouring savings and the money he made from a home sale into a literary magazine. “Gov. Perry created thousands of jobs, but they’re all at McDonald’s. Now everyone has a chance to make 15 cents. People are just pecking, hunting, scratching the dirt for freelance work. Living week to week, month to month.” . . .
A fading creative class — experiencing real pain but less likely to end up in homeless shelters, at least so far, than the very poor — may not offer sufficient drama for novelists, songwriters or photographers.
But journalists themselves have also ignored the human story all around them. In fact, the media — businesses that have been decimated by the Internet and corporate consolidation — have been reticent at telling the tale of this erosion. Good newspapers offer responsible coverage of the mortgage meltdown and the political wars over taxes and the deficit. But it’s easier to find a story about a plucky worker who’s risen from layoff to an inspiring Plan B than it is the more typical stories: People who lose their livelihood, their homes, their marriages, their children’s schooling because of the hollowing-out of the creative class and the shredded social safety net. Meanwhile, luxury coverage of homes, fashions, watches and wine continue to be a big part of magazines and newspapers.

Timberg’s essay is “provocative” only if you consider laughably misguided to be an acceptable definition of “provocative.”

Stipulate that a bad economy is bad for musicians, artists, writers and other “creative” types. This is why we never speak of, say, a “world-acclaimed Eritrean novelist” or a “multimillionaire Cambodian rock star.” People in impoverished nations are too busy scratching out a bare subsistence to pursue careers as dancers, poets and sculptors, nor is there enough surplus wealth in such societies to support a “creative class.” Economic prosperity is therefore a prerequisite to the flourishing of a cultural elite.

Timberg references Richard Florida’s much-discussed theory about the “creative class,” which was supposed to be the driving force of a 21st-century economy, but fails to see what was wrong with Florida’s argument: The clustering of “creatives” in certain locales was an effect, not a cause. Artists and musicians flock to these places because they seek markets for their goods and services. Demand creates supply, and not the other way around. No matter how wonderful you are as a composer of sonnets, if nobody’s buying sonnets you will be poor.

So if young poetic types are writing rock lyrics instead of sonnets, this is because the customer is always right. Whether aspiring poets are writing sonnets, rock lyrics or advertising jingles, however, their ability to earn a living by their talents is dependent upon the economic success of those who pay for their services.

What Timberg offers is an appeal to the narcissistic self-pity of the “creative class” itself. The readership of Salon includes many such people, and once can imagine how Timberg’s chronicling of the woes of the “creative class” resonates with these readers: The would-be novelist working as a busboy, the aspiring artist who can’t sell his paintings, the young actor who didn’t get a callback after the last audition. Yes, these people’s dreams are being crushed, but they are not suffering worse than out-of-work carpenters and accountants. A fitting headline for Timberg’s article might be:

OBAMA’S ECONOMIC POLICIES FAIL;
ARTISTS, MUSICIANS HARDEST HIT

But that headline doesn’t fit the narrative that the “creative class” wants to hear, in which the plight of downtrodden playwrights and out-of-work ballerinas is blamed on corporate greed or some other familiar bogeyman. Timberg solicits our pity for these Victims of Society, as if there were something more tragic in the misfortune of a laid-off writer for L.A. Weekly than for a laid-off forklift driver.

So I’m trying to feel some sympathy here.

Trying really hard.

Just give me a few minutes and I’m sure I’ll get there . . .