Alphabet & Junkyard, 1989
stainless steel letter O, crumpled and torn B/W photograph, wooden frame
36 x 46 x 8″

April 13, 2011
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Lecture Forum
Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT)
3001 S. Flower Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007

USC MFA Lecture Series

NY Times Published: April 9, 2011
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

There are certain popular diversions — television, video games, the Internet — that we pursue so deliriously we end up hating ourselves for loving them. Others we brightly recast as the duties of citizenship: newspapers, public radio, sports.

All the while, cottage industries crop up to freak us out about our every last cultural pursuit. In recent years, it’s Internet use that’s been styled as potentially sick, and “Internet addiction” a new reason for self-hatred.

If you’re inclined to worry about your habits, you may have already stumbled onto a strange and influential self-evaluation questionnaire by Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor of business at St. Bonaventure University. Though Dr. Young developed the test in 1998, early in Web life, it still dominates the Google returns for “Internet addiction” and steadily stirs up anxiety.

Dr. Young told me she believes the Internet is addictive in part because it “allows us to create new personalities and use them to fulfill unmet psychological needs” — which sounds worrying except that art, entertainment and communications systems are designed explicitly to permit self-exploration and satisfy psychological needs.

The way the test loads the cultural dice in favor of reality over fantasy should make hearts sink. In the hierarchy of the test, any real-world task or interaction, no matter how mundane or tedious, is more important — and, worse, ought to be more fulfilling — than online fantasy, research or social life. “Do you neglect household chores to use the Internet?” one question asks, and undone laundry is later cited as a warning sign. “How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the Internet?” goes another question.

Can this really be science? (And might another psychologist find something to admire in a person who quiets his mind with mere thoughts of the Internet?) I wondered whether other habits of cultural consumption were considered pathological enough to inspire tests. The Web carries a few tests for television addiction, and none for movies. Over on operaddiction.com, there are no tests, only recordings to order.

In general, if a pastime is not classy, those who love it are “addicted.” Opera and poetry buffs are “passionate.”

Virtually all non-work activities have, at one time or another, been represented as craven and diseased. Opera obsession leads to delinquency in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 film “Diva”; an intense movie habit deepens the alienation of the hero of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel “The Moviegoer.”

Novels themselves, now the signature pursuit of the sound and literate mind, have also been considered toxic, as in the 1797 analysis, “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity.” The 18th-century worry about female literacy is not unlike the contemporary anxiety that Web use above all makes girls vulnerable to “predators”: “Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice.” Taken together, these warnings against the very stuff that makes life worth living often seem either like veiled boasts (“I’m addicted to the symphony!”) or just absurd.

So why are authors and educators hellbent on using this shopworn rhetoric when it comes to Internet use?
Gabriela Gabriela

Two weeks ago, I met a professed Internet addict, a 20-year-old college student in New York named Gabriela. (Like many addicts, she preferred that only her first name be used.) One of Gabriela’s professors had told me she slept with her laptop, and was wired in the extreme. She told me she had taken Dr. Young’s test and was worried about her Internet habits.

In e-mail, Gabriela struck a note between irony and concern as she described her symptoms. She told me she keeps an extremely late bedtime, sometimes 4 a.m., because she’s up noodling around online.

She then described a typical surfing session: “I’ll be on Facebook and see a status update of song lyrics, and I’ll Google them and find the band name, that I will subsequently Wikipedia and discover that the lead singer is interesting and briefly look at his Twitter and try his music on Grooveshark” — a music search engine and streaming service — “while looking at pictures of him on Tumblr” — the multimedia microblogging platform — “that will lead me to a meme I’ve never heard of that I’ll explore until I find hilarious photos I will subsequently share with friends of mine on Facebook.” Gabriela, who sometimes dresses in the futuristic Victoriana known as steampunk, also loves Webcomics, a site for graphic novels and comic books, and Neopets, a game that lets players care for virtual pets.

She indeed sleeps with her laptop in her bed, “partly so I can have my iTunes play my Sleep playlist.” Even on the Sabbath, when she refrains from Internet use for religious reasons, she talks and thinks about the Internet. She told me she considers surfing the Web not so much a regimen but “a state of being” that, like a meditative state, took her years to achieve.

Aha. I’m no addiction expert, but Gabriela strikes me as a bright, self-effacing, religious young woman who keeps student hours and prefers logic games, jokes, graphic novels, trivia quizzes, music, Victoriana and socializing on Facebook to prefab pop bands.

This kind of Internet use isn’t usefully described as an addiction, even if there’s some shirking of chores and insomnia to it. Fantasy life and real life should, ideally, be brought into balance — but no student who’s making decent grades needs to get off the Internet just because it would look more respectable or comprehensible to be playing chess, throwing a Frisbee or reading a George Orwell paperback. The Internet as Gabriela uses it simply is intellectual life, and play. She’s just the person I’d want for a student, in fact — or a friend, or a daughter.

It’s no accident that “search” is the dominant metaphor of the Internet. And it’s no accident that the Internet attracts a certain kind of young, dreamy mind at some liberty to find itself — the type that in earlier eras might have been drawn to novels or movies. As Binx Bolling puts it in “The Movie goer”: “What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is often overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

By Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times
April 10, 2011

John McCracken, an artist whose fusion of painting with geometric sculpture in the mid-1960s came to embody an aesthetic distinctive to postwar Los Angeles, died Friday in New York. He was 76.

McCracken had lived in Santa Fe, N.M., since 1994 and, according to a spokesman for his Manhattan gallery, had been in ill health.

One among a group of artists whose work was variously described as representing the L.A. Cool School, thanks to its rejection of emotionally expressive gestures; Finish Fetish, in recognition of its pristine color and high-tech surfaces; and Minimalism, because of its reliance on simple geometric forms, McCracken in fact made singular painted sculptures that value a clarity of perception infused with spiritual connotations. The difficulty in naming his practice or easily linking it to a school attests to the success of his artistic ambition.

The geometric forms McCracken employed were typically built from straight lines: cubes, rectangular slabs and rods, stepped or quadrilateral pyramids, post-and-lintel structures and, most memorably, tall planks that lean against the wall. Usually, the form is painted in sprayed lacquer, which does not reveal the artist’s hand. An industrial look is belied by sensuous color.

His palette included bubble-gum pink, lemon yellow, deep sapphire and ebony, usually applied as a monochrome. Sometimes an application of multiple colors marbleizes or runs down the sculpture’s surface, like a molten lava flow. He also made objects of softly stained wood or, in recent years, highly polished bronze and reflective stainless steel.

Embracing formal impurity at a time when purity was highly prized, the works embody perceptual and philosophical conundrums. The colored planks stand on the floor like sculptures; rely on the wall for support like paintings; and, bridging both floor and wall, define architectural space. Their shape is resolutely linear, but the point at which the line assumes the dimensional properties of a shape is indefinable.

“My tendency,” McCracken once said, “is to reduce or develop everything to ‘single things’ — things which refer to nothing outside [themselves] but which at the same time possibly refer, or relate, to everything.” These “single things,” abstract rather than figurative, embody a simultaneous sense of individual and collective identity typically ascribed to human beings.

In 1971-72 he made a rarely seen series of paintings based on Hindu and Buddhist mandalas. They are included in a 40-year McCracken survey exhibited at the Castello di Rivoli Museum in Turin, Italy, through June 19.

McCracken was bedeviled by Stanley Kubrick’s famously obscure science-fiction epic, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with its iconic image of an ancient monolith floating in outer space. The 1968 blockbuster was released two years after the artist made his first plank.

“At the time, some people thought I had designed the monolith or that it had been derived from my work,” he told art critic Frances Colpitt of the coincidence in a 1998 interview.

McCracken was born Dec. 9, 1934, in Berkeley and studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts. After his first solo show at L.A.’s adventurous Nicholas Wilder Gallery in 1965, he moved south. He taught for many years at schools in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara before moving to Santa Fe. His work is in most major American museum collections, including those of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His last solo show was at David Zwirner Gallery in New York in September.

In addition to his wife, artist Gail Barringer, McCracken is survived by sons David and Patrick of Oakland; stepdaughter Suzanne Leblanc of Houston; and sisters Margaret Eibert of Ridgewood, N.J., and Pamela Rose of Sacramento.

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“Cherchez Holopherne, Chapter 21″
April 13th 2011 – June 25th 2011
Opening reception on
Wednesday, April 13th 2011
7:00 – 9:00 pm

Daniel Buchholz

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 10, 2011

What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?

I realize that with hostile Republicans controlling the House, there’s not much Mr. Obama can get done in the way of concrete policy. Arguably, all he has left is the bully pulpit. But he isn’t even using that — or, rather, he’s using it to reinforce his enemies’ narrative.

His remarks after last week’s budget deal were a case in point.

Maybe that terrible deal, in which Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid, was the best he could achieve — although it looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions.

And bear in mind that this was just the first of several chances for Republicans to hold the budget hostage and threaten a government shutdown; by caving in so completely on the first round, Mr. Obama set a baseline for even bigger concessions over the next few months.

But let’s give the president the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that $38 billion in spending cuts — and a much larger cut relative to his own budget proposals — was the best deal available. Even so, did Mr. Obama have to celebrate his defeat? Did he have to praise Congress for enacting “the largest annual spending cut in our history,” as if shortsighted budget cuts in the face of high unemployment — cuts that will slow growth and increase unemployment — are actually a good idea?

Among other things, the latest budget deal more than wipes out any positive economic effects of the big prize Mr. Obama supposedly won from last December’s deal, a temporary extension of his 2009 tax cuts for working Americans. And the price of that deal, let’s remember, was a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts, at an immediate cost of $363 billion, and a potential cost that’s much larger — because it’s now looking increasingly likely that those irresponsible tax cuts will be made permanent.

More broadly, Mr. Obama is conspicuously failing to mount any kind of challenge to the philosophy now dominating Washington discussion — a philosophy that says the poor must accept big cuts in Medicaid and food stamps; the middle class must accept big cuts in Medicare (actually a dismantling of the whole program); and corporations and the rich must accept big cuts in the taxes they have to pay. Shared sacrifice!

I’m not exaggerating. The House budget proposal that was unveiled last week — and was praised as “bold” and “serious” by all of Washington’s Very Serious People — includes savage cuts in Medicaid and other programs that help the neediest, which would among other things deprive 34 million Americans of health insurance. It includes a plan to privatize and defund Medicare that would leave many if not most seniors unable to afford health care. And it includes a plan to sharply cut taxes on corporations and to bring the tax rate on high earners down to its lowest level since 1931.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center puts the revenue loss from these tax cuts at $2.9 trillion over the next decade. House Republicans claim that the tax cuts can be made “revenue neutral” by “broadening the tax base” — that is, by closing loopholes and ending exemptions. But you’d need to close a lot of loopholes to close a $3 trillion gap; for example, even completely eliminating one of the biggest exemptions, the mortgage interest deduction, wouldn’t come close. And G.O.P. leaders have not, of course, called for anything that drastic. I haven’t seen them name any significant exemptions they would end.

You might have expected the president’s team not just to reject this proposal, but to see it as a big fat political target. But while the G.O.P. proposal has drawn fire from a number of Democrats — including a harsh condemnation from Senator Max Baucus, a centrist who has often worked with Republicans — the White House response was a statement from the press secretary expressing mild disapproval.

What’s going on here? Despite the ferocious opposition he has faced since the day he took office, Mr. Obama is clearly still clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend America’s partisan differences. And his political strategists seem to believe that he can win re-election by positioning himself as being conciliatory and reasonable, by always being willing to compromise.

But if you ask me, I’d say that the nation wants — and more important, the nation needs — a president who believes in something, and is willing to take a stand. And that’s not what we’re seeing. 

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: April 9, 2011

Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out.

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China on Wednesday at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing, he ignored his own warning in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — “Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose” — and let the government pre-approve his set.

Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.

Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.

“The Times They Are Not a-Changin’,” noted The Financial Times under a picture of the grizzled 69-year-old on stage in a Panama hat.

“Imagine if the Tea Party in Idaho said to him, ‘You’re not allowed to play whatever,’ you’d get a very different response,” said an outraged Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.

A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.

David Hajdu, the New Republic music critic, says the singer has always shown a tension between “not wanting to be a leader and wanting to be a celebrity.”

In Hajdu’s book, “Positively 4th Street,” Dylan is quoted saying that critics who charged that he’d sold out to rock ’n’ roll had it backward.

“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. … I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”

“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.”

He can’t really betray the spirit of the ’60s because he never had it. In his memoir, “Chronicles,” he stressed that he had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the “cultural mumbo jumbo” imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.

“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he said.

He wrote that he wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and pink roses in back, live in East Hampton with his wife and pack of kids, eat Cheerios and go to the Rainbow Room and see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform.

“Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he wrote. He complained of being “anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent.”

Performing his message songs came to feel “like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat,” he wrote.

Hajdu told me that Dylan has distanced himself from his protest songs because “he’s probably aware of the kind of careerism that’s apparent in that work.” Dylan employed propaganda to get successful but knows those songs are “too rigidly polemical” to be his best work.

“Maybe the Chinese bureaucrats are better music critics than we give them credit for,” Hajdu said, adding that Dylan was now “an old-school touring pro” like Frank Sinatra Sr.

Sean Wilentz, the Princeton professor who wrote “Bob Dylan in America,” said that the Chinese were “trying to guard the audience from some figure who hasn’t existed in 40 years. He’s been frozen in aspic in 1963 but he’s not the guy in the work shirt and blue jeans singing ‘Masters of War.’ ”

Wilentz and Hajdu say you can’t really censor Dylan because his songs are infused with subversion against all kinds of authority, except God. He’s been hard on bosses, courts, pols and anyone corrupted by money and power.

Maybe the songwriter should reread some of his own lyrics: “I think you will find/When your death takes its toll/All the money you made/Will never buy back your soul.”

Untitled Outdoor Sculpture (1984)

Peter Shire

Thanks Peter!

“In der Pyramide”
April 13th 2011 – June 25th 2011

Opening reception on
Wednesday, April 13th 2011
7:00 – 9:00 pm

Daniel Buchholz

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NY Times Published April 8, 2011

SEATTLE — The loneliest man in this city may be the pear-shaped billionaire whose yacht occasionally glides across Lake Washington at dusk, heading for a big empty house filled with stuff to keep him distracted.

On the surface, Paul Allen lives an enviable life. The fruits of his passions are all around Seattle: a stylish stadium that sells out every soccer game, one of the nation’s largest urban makeovers, in the South Lake Union area, and a research center trying to unlock secrets of the human brain.

The co-founder of Microsoft has gone from state-school dropout to one of the world’s richest men, and twice had the kind of serious cancer scare that makes people think hard about the randomness of death. For all of that, there’s a hole in his soul — at least that’s one way to read the cri de coeur of his new book, “Idea Man,” to be published later this month.

Behind every great fortune, goes the Balzac maxim, lies a great crime. But also, a great hurt. The nasty news from a book excerpt in Vanity Fair was Allen’s claim that his longtime friend and partner Bill Gates tried to cut him out of a much larger share of Microsoft billions.

Allen writes about overhearing a conversation in the early 1980s between Gates and Steve Ballmer, the hyperkinetic current chief executive of Microsoft.

“I burst in on them and shouted, “This is unbelievable!’” he writes. “I helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off. It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple.”

Gates later apologized, and Allen, who’s shown that he doesn’t exactly have a Midas touch as an investor, left the company with shares worth far more than the schemers wanted to give him.

With the book, Allen clearly wants to shape his reputation for posterity. He portrays himself as the thoughtful plodder, a librarian’s son who is more naïve than his partner the lawyer’s son. Both are among the Gutenbergs of tech, and that should be enough.

But what really matters, to the rest of world, are their second acts. And on that count they are role models for a new kind of billionaires’ boys club — those who pledge to give it all away, and not just in granite monuments to self.

Consider the alternative. Donald Trump, whose glitzy garbage litters the land, is best known for having an ego bigger than a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. In his case, the helium is the hair. “The beauty of me,” he said the other day, “is that I am very, very rich.”

Then there are the Koch brothers, David and Charles, who’ve given to cancer research and the arts, yes, but also pour millions into efforts to keep average workers from getting a fair shake, and against laws that protect clean water and air. They plan to spend millions more in next year’s election to support policies that ensure the gap between rich and poor grows ever bigger.

We are most obsessed with the frothy, silly rich, a Paris Hilton or a Dennis Kozlowski, he of the $6,000 shower curtain.

I know Gates only in passing, for the record. He is a very inconspicuous rich man in his hometown. Allen, whom I’ve also met a few times, strikes me as an unfathomable Nowhere Man. I once spent an afternoon asking him random questions, and left with a notebook full of clichés — the typical Allen interview.

The transformation of Bill Gates shows that a rich man can change his image, and a lot of other things, in a fairly short time. Not long ago, if you Googled his name what came up were rants comparing him to the anti-Christ. Now, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he’s already given away more money than any American, and plans to spread a total of $60 billion or so in targeted philanthropy.

The middle-aged man who goes on and on about how malaria deaths can be reduced, or the scourge of H.I.V. in Africa, is light years removed from the brilliant tyrant in Allen’s account: a geeky executive who prowled the parking lot looking for someone who dared to leave work early.

Gates and Allen have both taken the “pledge,” among 60 or so of the very rich who’ve made a public vow to give away most of their fortunes. See the list here.

Of course, these titans could have worked for a fair tax code — the Gates family actually has — or paid their workers more when they were amassing their billions. And some see the giving pledge as a packaging stunt.

Those are valid complaints. But again, consider the alternative. With pressure on the rich to make philanthropy an imperative, there’s a real chance to alleviate some of the solvable sufferings of the world.

Say what you will about Gates during his rapacious capitalist phase, by the time his foundation goes out of business millions of people will have better lives — and some will even owe their lives to his wealth.

Allen can play with his Jimi Hendrix guitars and finance the search for alien life in outer space — two obsessions of this oddest of billionaires.

He doesn’t need to revise the story about how he and Gates made their pile. Give them both credit for following the dictum of the nation’s founding philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie. “A man who dies rich,” he said, “dies disgraced.”

Johann Erdmann Hummel’s drawing “Sitting Room,” about 1820.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: April 7, 2011

The first thing that distinguishes “Rooms With a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century,” a compact, quietly splendid exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is simply this: Its galleries have been painted a wonderful shade of oyster-grayish white. In the context of the Met, where the walls of special exhibitions tend toward plum, russet or evergreen, this pale, elegant hue is the visual equivalent of smelling salts.

Its head-clearing effect is the perfect start for a show of artworks permeated for the most part by a luminous light and a concomitant clarity of vision that regularly translates life’s daily pleasures — starting with looking out windows — into images of surprising formal rigor and emotional weight.

As the title implies, the show has a fairly specific theme. Its 31 modest paintings and 26 works on paper, borrowed from museums all over Europe, depict interiors with windows. Organized by Sabine Rewald, of the Met’s department of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, the show explores the open window as a favored motif of certain Romantic painters — mostly German, Scandinavian or French.

It begins, chronologically, in the early 1800s with the great German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, and extends almost to 1860 with some presciently Impressionist works by the facile Adolph Menzel, also German. But the majority of its works fall between 1810 and 1830. As seen here, the window often is the focal point for a certain poignant, implicitly Romantic yearning, functioning as an interface between near and far, known and mysterious, private and public, art and nature. This yearning is especially tangible in Friedrich’s 1822 “Woman at the Window,” which shows his wife, her back to us, straining delicately to see out of a window narrowed by shutters.

The images in “Rooms With a View” range from cozy Biedermeier sitting rooms to vaulting studios at the Villa Medici in Rome and tend to convey a decidedly cosseted vision of life. You’d never know that parts of Europe were ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath for many of the years covered by this show.

Yet the works here may qualify as passively subversive. They determinedly say no to established authoritative statements: formal portraiture and large-scale history painting, or depictions of grand structures and even the stark or overwhelming landscapes characteristic of a more outdoorsy Romanticism, including Friedrich’s.

Instead the works here stay close to home, concentrating on the places and often the people the artists knew best, and resonating with intimate truths and internal logics of their own. The show sings with the satisfying visual rhyming of the four-square forms of windows, walls and rooms with the rectilinear format of canvas or paper. The geometries of everyday life echo the actual proportions of the works before our eyes, reinforcing and elaborating the act of looking.

Many of these images have the sweetness and modesty of photographs, whose rise was still years off when most of these works were made. Certainly they seem closer to photography in their realism and uninflected revelations of detail than to the interiors and genres scenes of the 17th-century Dutch paintings from which they descend, although they have an immediacy of detail and color that photography would not achieve until the early 20th century.

Each work presents an unpretentious, eminently habitable space that seems almost continuous with our own. Some rooms are depicted with one or more occupants — a standing couple, seemingly deep in conversation; a man sitting at a desk; a woman similarly situated, embroidering by an open window; another woman sewing at night, with one of the show’s few depictions of a lowered shade.

These particular events all transpire in small canvases painted from 1811 to 1827 by Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847), a close friend of Friedrich’s who is not well known to American audiences. He seemed to specialize in images of self-knowing solitude and, represented by seven paintings here, is one of the show’s stars.

Other images brim with quiet companionship. In Wilhelm Bendz’s marvelous interior, the artist’s two brothers pursue their studies in a slightly disheveled room distinguished by vivid turquoise walls. You may want to live there, once they pick up a bit. In “The Family Circle” by the Danish artist Emilius Baerentzen from around 1803, we encounter a man, three women and a child in a sitting room whose window, draped in a light-infused translucent red curtain, reveals a view of sunbathed building facades that reads as a separate painting.

Other rooms are empty or nearly so, and often become the occasion for richocheting reflections of form and space caught in mirrors. This happens quietly in the grays of Kersting’s watercolor “Interior II” and flamoyantly in an ink-wash rendering by Johann Erdmann Hummel, where one-point perspective is exquisitely amplified by the pulsing geometries of carpet and ceiling beams. Many of the interiors are modest domestic spaces, a sitting room or small study. But a substantial number are artists’ studios, whether they overlook the Elbe in Dresden or St. Peter’s in Rome.

One of the show’s subtexts, in fact, is the way artists lived and worked and related to one another during this era, often by painting one another at work. For example, Kersting’s 1812 painting of the painter Friedrich Matthäi in his studio shows a slight, nervous man hunched over a small oil study on his easel; heavier lifting awaits in the form of a wide swath of pristine canvas extending from a roll of the material onto a towering white framelike structure.

One of the show’s rare self-portraits is a seductive study in creamy textures from 1817 that shows the young French painter Léon Cogniet, in his high-ceilinged room at the French Academy’s recently acquired Villa Medici in Rome, newly arrived and with his bags barely unpacked. Cogniet leans against his bed reading what Ms. Rewald identifies as a letter from home, while the lush landscape visible through an open window resembles a large oil study that he might soon paint. Seemingly suspended between action and indolence, art and bed, the world back home and the one outside his window, Cogniet perfectly captures his ambivalence.

According to Ms. Rewald, all this began with Friedrich, who gave a new emphasis to the window motif in some sepia drawings from 1805-6 that depict one or another of the beautifully proportioned windows, set in generous, round-topped niches, in his studio overlooking the Dresden riverfront. Two of these drawings hang in the show’s third gallery, and their stripped-down severity still startles. They have the kind of unstinting precision that Ingres might lavish on a drawing of an elaborately accoutered Parisian, yet they exalt nothing but the bare-bones form of the windows and the gentle light they admit to a plain room that we barely see. (Friedrich’s studio was frequently compared to a monk’s cell, an observation borne out by Kersting’s 1811 painting of his friend hard at work at his easel. )

These works remained with Friedrich for years, influencing artists who visited him — including some with studios in the same Dresden building and who depicted views through similar windows in works that are also in the show. In one of these the Danish artist Johan Christian Dahl — wanting to avoid copying his friend too closely — has replaced the distant harbor view in Friedrich’s drawings with a glistening Prussian palace that was actually several miles upriver.

The room-window-view equation turned out to be a satisfying, self-ordering arrangement that continued to attract painters, reaching an apotheosis of sorts — but hardly exhausting itself — in the art of Matisse. Over the course of this marvelous show, that equation is under constant adjustment. In addition to windows that look like paintings in their own right, some windows are mere blank rectangles; others expand the painting-within-a-painting concept until the room all but disappears.

These fluctuations, with illumination as the constant, offer support for the argument that painting may ultimately be about little more than the communication of some quality of light and space, however abstract or indirect. In “Rooms With a View” this communication is marvelously direct.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Published: April 7, 2011

Many commentators swooned earlier this week after House Republicans, led by the Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan, unveiled their budget proposals. They lavished praise on Mr. Ryan, asserting that his plan set a new standard of fiscal seriousness.

Well, they should have waited until people who know how to read budget numbers had a chance to study the proposal. For the G.O.P. plan turns out not to be serious at all. Instead, it’s simultaneously ridiculous and heartless.

How ridiculous is it? Let me count the ways — or rather a few of the ways, because there are more howlers in the plan than I can cover in one column.

First, Republicans have once again gone all in for voodoo economics — the claim, refuted by experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves.

Specifically, the Ryan proposal trumpets the results of an economic projection from the Heritage Foundation, which claims that the plan’s tax cuts would set off a gigantic boom. Indeed, the foundation initially predicted that the G.O.P. plan would bring the unemployment rate down to 2.8 percent — a number we haven’t achieved since the Korean War. After widespread jeering, the unemployment projection vanished from the Heritage Foundation’s Web site, but voodoo still permeates the rest of the analysis.

In particular, the original voodoo proposition — the claim that lower taxes mean higher revenue — is still very much there. The Heritage Foundation projection has large tax cuts actually increasing revenue by almost $600 billion over the next 10 years.

A more sober assessment from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells a different story. It finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

And about those spending cuts: leave health care on one side for a moment and focus on the rest of the proposal. It turns out that Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are assuming drastic cuts in nonhealth spending without explaining how that is supposed to happen.

How drastic? According to the budget office, which analyzed the plan using assumptions dictated by House Republicans, the proposal calls for spending on items other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — but including defense — to fall from 12 percent of G.D.P. last year to 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2022, and just 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the long run.

That last number is less than we currently spend on defense alone; it’s not much bigger than federal spending when Calvin Coolidge was president, and the United States, among other things, had only a tiny military establishment. How could such a drastic shrinking of government take place without crippling essential public functions? The plan doesn’t say.

And then there’s the much-ballyhooed proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers that can be used to buy private health insurance.

The point here is that privatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care.

And that neither should nor will happen. Mr. Ryan and his colleagues can write down whatever numbers they like, but seniors vote. And when they find that their health-care vouchers are grossly inadequate, they’ll demand and get bigger vouchers — wiping out the plan’s supposed savings.

In short, this plan isn’t remotely serious; on the contrary, it’s ludicrous.

And it’s also cruel.

In the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. And by repealing last year’s health reform, without any replacement, the plan would also deprive an estimated 34 million nonelderly Americans of health insurance.

So the pundits who praised this proposal when it was released were punked. The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness. 

Curated by Richard Aldrich

Opens Tonight April 7th, 2011 6 to 8pm

Kaoru Arima, Daan van Golden, Heather Guertin, Charline von Heyl, Matt Hoyt, Amy Lien, Erik Lindman, Jason Loebs, Peter Mandradjieff, Carissa Rodriguez, Julia Rommel, Terry Winters, Anicka Yi

A writer (theorist) or a curator is a kind of artist. They know (unconsciously) what they are looking for. They are drawn to things, and need only to take what they have seen and contextualize it in their own way, use it their own way to make sense and begin to articulate their own feelings. Thus two readers, after finishing the same book, have two separate ideas of the book. And this is the best thing: these same two readers could meet again in ten years and reread the same book and have two new ideas. Marriage is the desire to have a mirror to gauge oneself everyday: “what did you think of that?” you could say to your spouse. Or often you don’t even need to say anything. This is why art is so important, something to look at and use to recognize and construct how we are feeling. This is why art needs to be so free, and this is why the artist that writes has become out of date. It is always changing: the 50s painters distrusted Motherwell because he had gone to school. The minimalists lauded Smithson because he wrote such good jokes. These days the primacy-of-writing mentality still exists (but without the good jokes). This has come to represent our avant-garde: a press release. But even Proust was laughed at as a writer of soap-operas. We work from our past, and history sorts it all out. Maybe this is the market, which really just means “how do we cover up their insecurity?” so of course a witty text (press release) is a good idea, or an opaque one for the obvious reason (they are a genius exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point).

There is a good joke that a cop finds a drunk stumbling around in front of a lamp post. The cop says to the drunk, “what are you doing?” The drunk says, “I lost my keys in the alley and am trying to find them.” The cop says, “If you lost them in the alley why are looking out here by the lamppost?” To which the drunk replies, “the light is better out here.”

There is a sort of making that is responding to life and there is a sort of making that becomes a means of not getting at true feelings, a distraction, conscious or otherwise, that often comes from fear. The intellect often serves this purpose as does a reliance on it to legitimize or rationalize our actions and our desires rather than acknowledge them for what they are. It is always easier to stay in the light, to not stare into the abyss*, but where is this getting us?

I guess what I am saying is that it is into this abyss that I find these artists staring. The work varies in aesthetic or social connection, but that is the point too. There isn’t a “look” to an internal conflict. We still see minimal, we still see abstract, we still see conceptual, and we hold these aesthetics to some structure of meaning or history, but isn’t the main precept of our day that the ways in which we get information is just as important as that information? What is important here is that the connecting tissue isn’t a signifier or formal quality or relation to cultural production, but rather the similar, less delineated strain of, say, intention or a self contextual-framing; or an emotional kinship in an approach to working regardless of whatever the eventual object is.

– Richard Aldrich

Bortolami

By DENNIS HEVESI
NY Times Published: April 5, 2011

Dr. David M. French, who helped found an organization of doctors that provided medical care to marchers during the civil rights era and who later organized health care programs in 20 African nations, died on Thursday in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86 and lived in Barboursville, Va.

The cause was a pulmonary embolism, his son Howard said.

A surgeon, Dr. French was an organizer of the Medical Committee for Human Rights and in March 1965 led more than 120 of its members in the third, and finally successful, attempt by voting-rights advocates to march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, the state capital.

Only a few committee members had been in Selma on March 7 when state troopers used billy clubs to beat back marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Two days later, a second march was stopped when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decided to obey a court order.

But after the injunction was lifted, hundreds of marchers completed the 51-mile trek, with Dr. French’s group providing care. The marchers were protected along the route by federal troops deployed, in part, in response to telegrams sent by Dr. French to Johnson administration officials.

In June 1966, as president of the medical committee, Dr. French organized another contingent that provided care to hundreds of marchers two days after James Meredith, the first African-American to attend the University of Mississippi, was shot by a roadside sniper while on a march from Memphis to Jackson, Miss.

Guarded by state highway patrol officers, the marchers were not attacked along the 220-mile route, though some were beaten when they ventured from the main road. With little possibility of local medical care, they were treated by members of Dr. French’s team. Dr. French and his wife, Carolyn, used their Dodge camper as an ambulance. The Medical Committee for Human Rights became the ad hoc health arm for many protest movements.

In his 2009 book “The Good Doctors,” John Dittmer wrote: “Wherever there was a demonstration or confrontation, be it at the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma or on the Meredith March in the South, in Resurrection City with the Poor People’s Campaign, at Columbia University during the student rebellion, in the streets outside of Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention in 1969, or at Wounded Knee with the American Indian Movement, men and women in white coats and Red Cross armbands were on the scene, providing ‘medical presence’ and assistance to the people who were putting themselves at risk.”

David Marshall French was born in Toledo, Ohio, on May 30, 1924, to Joseph and Bertha Dickerson French. The family later moved to Columbus, Ohio.

Dr. French’s wife of 64 years, the former Carolyn Howard, died in 2009. Besides his son Howard, a former reporter for The New York Times, he is survived by four daughters, Lynn French, Mary Ann French, Bertha French and Dorothy Boone; three other sons, David Jr., Joseph and James; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Dr. French was a pre-med student at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland when he was drafted into the Army in World War II. Sent to a camp holding German prisoners of war in Abilene, Tex., he and other black soldiers were assigned to pick cotton to be used in uniforms. “It was not lost on him that the German officers were better treated than he was,” his daughter Lynn said.

Under a military program, he was accepted by the Howard University School of Medicine, from which he graduated in 1948. Dr. French and his family later moved to Detroit, where he became active in the N.A.A.C.P.

In 1969, after earning a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins, Dr. French was recruited by the Boston University Medical School to establish and lead its department of community medicine, which created a network of health centers in the city.

During a drought in Africa in the 1970s, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts asked Dr. French to tour the continent’s Sahel region. As a result, he created and led Strengthening Health Delivery Systems, which has since trained thousands of health care workers in 20 West and Central African countries.

Ansco Plenachrome Film 120 March 1956, 2011, C-print, 16 x 20 inches

Opening April 7th, 2011 6-8pm

Bortolami

By ROGER COHEN
NY Times Published: April 4, 2011

LONDON — So Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who organized a Koran burning on March 20, wanted “to stir the pot.” Mission accomplished. Perhaps he’d care to explain himself to the family of Joakim Dungel, a 33-year-old Swede slaughtered at the U.N. mission in Mazar-i-Sharif by Afghans whipped into frenzy through Jones’s folly.

On reflection, no, there’s nothing Jones can explain to Dungel’s family, or the other U.N. staffers murdered. Jones is not in the explanation business. He’s a zealot. How else to describe a Christian who interprets his faith not as grounded in love and compassion but as a mission to incite hatred toward Islam?

There’s no discussion with a bigot like this: You can’t be argued out of something you haven’t been argued into in the first place.

Jones is not alone in this Islamophobic campaign in the United States, which is what is most disturbing. But before I get to that, let’s talk about the murderous Afghan mob and its enablers.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, was one such enabler. He was a fool to allude to Jones’s stunt, performed before a few dozen acolytes. Why elevate this vile little deed and so foster mayhem?

Karzai is a man who will stop at nothing to disguise his weakness. His benefactors and underwriters — the West — are those he must scorn to survive.

The foolishness did not stop with Karzai: The imams of Mazar chose to use Friday prayers to stir up the crowd. As for the killing itself — whether by infiltrated Taliban insurgents or not — it was a heinous crime against innocent people and should be denounced throughout the Islamic world, in mosques and beyond. I’m still waiting.

Staffan de Mistura, the top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, did not honor the dead by failing to denounce the perpetrators of the crime in a statement. He was right to call Jones’s Koran burning “insane and totally despicable;” he should have used the same words about the slaughter of his men. Not to do so was craven, a glaring omission.

All this madness began at the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida, home to Jones’s mini-church. As my colleague Lizette Alvarez chronicled, an unrepentant Jones believes Islam and the Koran only serve “violence, death and terrorism.” That’s as dumb as equating Christianity with Psalm 137 that says the “little ones” of the enemy should be dashed against stones.

But such incendiary views about a world religion now find wide expression in the United States where “stealth jihad” has become a recurrent Republican theme.

Several Republicans, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, have found it politically opportune to target “creeping Shariah in the United States” at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein. (A Newsweek poll last year found that 52 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that “Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.”)

I spent time last year with Paul Blair, a pastor in small-town Oklahoma, a state where Islamophobia is rampant. He told me Muslims were “not here to coexist but to take over.” He told me there are only two possibilities in Islam — “the house of Islam or the house of war.”

That sort of message is going out in a lot of U.S. churches. It’s dangerous. Already, Muslims are victims in 14 percent of religious discrimination cases when they make up 1 percent of the population.

In Europe, too, rightist politicians peddle divisive anti-Muslim bigotry, with some success.

Muslims have work to do. They should have the courage to denounce unequivocally the Mazar murder. Jihadists have too often deformed a great religion with insufficient rebuke. From Egypt to Pakistan, it must be understood that Islam cannot at once be a political force and above criticism. Once you enter the democratic political arena on a religious platform, your beliefs are no longer a private matter but up for legitimate attack. Pakistan’s violence-inducing blasphemy laws are an affront to this principle.

Jones, by contrast, lives in a nation where the law defends even his folly. I’m a free-speech absolutist and so I support that. But he must examine his conscience: How is it consistent with religious faith to stir hatred and killing? And how can the Islamophobes, spreading poison, justify their grotesque caricature of Islam in the thinly veiled pursuit of political gain?

This column is full of anger, I know. It has no heroes. I’m full of disgust, writing after a weekend when religious violence returned to Northern Ireland with the murder of a 25-year-old Catholic policeman, Ronan Kerr, by dissident republican terrorists. Religion has much to answer for, in Gainesville and Mazar and Omagh.

I see why lots of people turn to religion — fear of death, ordering principle in a mysterious universe, refuge from pain, even revelation. But surely it’s meaningless without mercy and forgiveness, and surely its very antithesis must be hatred and murder. At least that’s how it appears to a nonbeliever.

Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

Tsuyako Ito, 84, a geisha since she was 14, in a hospital in Kamaishi, Japan, on Saturday.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
NY Times Published: April 4, 2011

KAMAISHI, Japan — The requests to see her perform had dwindled over the years. But when the earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, this city’s last geisha was, fittingly, at home getting ready to sing that night at Kamaishi’s 117-year-old ryotei, an exclusive restaurant featuring fine food and entertainment where she began working as a 14-year-old seven decades ago.

She had already put on the white split-toe socks she would wear with her kimono and was preparing to put her hair up. Hired to entertain a party of four in honor of a colleague’s transfer from Kamaishi, she had picked just the right song, one meant to steel young samurai going to their first battle.

But a tsunami would engulf this city within 35 minutes and, as Kamaishi trembled from at least 15 big aftershocks during that short time, the geisha, Tsuyako Ito, 84, fought to survive. She had lived through three tsunamis before in Kamaishi, a place that the waves have destroyed with regularity over the centuries, and as a girl she had listened to her grandmother’s tales of the great 1896 tsunami.

“My grandmother said that a tsunami is like a wide-open mouth that swallows everything in its path,” Ms. Ito said from a local hospital where she was being treated for asthma, “so that victory comes to those who run away as fast as possible.”

Her mother carried her on her back to safety at the time of Ms. Ito’s first tsunami in 1933. This time, after her legs gave out, an admirer carried Ms. Ito on his back to higher ground. Ms. Ito, who had planned to retire on her 88th birthday, a milestone in Japan, survived her fourth — and “most frightening” — tsunami.

The waves, however, swept away her shamisen, a three-stringed instrument, and kimono, the two tools essential to a geisha’s art.

The recent tsunami is believed to have killed about 1,300 people in Kamaishi, whose low-lying areas have been transformed into a dusty ghost town where the smell of ruined buildings now mingles with that of the sea.

The birthplace of Japan’s steel industry, Kamaishi played a key role in the country’s modernization and militarization, so that it became the first target on mainland Japan of American warships during World War II. During Japan’s postwar boom, the city’s population swelled as it easily overcame the ravages of two tsunamis.

Kamaishi became famous for its delicious seafood; the winning ways of the rugby team of its main employer, Nippon Steel; and its diversions.

As Japan’s fortunes have declined in the past two decades, Kamaishi’s fall has been faster and steeper.

Its population, nearly 100,000 two generations ago, has now fallen below 40,000 and is aging. Many who have lost homes and businesses here are not expected to remain.

But Ms. Ito vowed to sing and dance again in Kamaishi. A famous beauty, she both danced and played the shamisen, while most geishas were skilled only at playing the shamisen, said Setsuko Kanazawa, whose family owns Saiwairo, the ryotei where she performs.

To cultural preservationists here, she is the guardian of a local culture that was fast disappearing.

The last ryotei in Kamaishi, Saiwairo was also its most exclusive. It was built in 1894 on the most elevated point of an area that would be dotted with bars, brothels and other ryoteis. While tsunamis washed away Saiwairo’s neighbors, they never reached its first floor.

It was at Saiwairo that Ms. Ito began an apprenticeship at the age of 14.

“I loved to dance,” she said. “And I simply wanted to become a leading geisha in Kamaishi.”

The truth, whispered for decades inside the family home, was darker, said Satoshi Ito, Ms. Ito’s nephew. Ms. Ito’s father ran a small-time construction business and, her nephew said, had ties with Japan’s gangsters, the yakuza.

“He would repair roads here and there, using yakuza to control certain areas,” said Mr. Ito, 63, who lived with his aunt here but is now staying at an evacuation shelter.

“Her father is supposed to have told her she was suited for that life,” he added. “But to put it harshly, I think that he did it to guarantee some debts.”

After a marriage to a sushi restaurant owner, the birth of a daughter and a divorce, Ms. Ito went to Tokyo to study dance under a famous instructor. Back in Kamaishi, Ms. Ito and a dozen other geishas were constantly on call at this city’s ryoteis, as Kamaishi’s economy began booming in the 1950s. At Saiwairo, steel industry executives occupied some rooms as owners of fishing vessels held parties in others, Ms. Kanazawa said.

But Kamaishi’s economy peaked a decade before Japan’s did, as the city’s two main industries began declining in the 1970s.

Nippon Steel began moving its operations out of Kamaishi, eventually closing down its blast furnaces in 1989; fishing shrank as new rules on exclusive economic zones kept Kamaishi’s fishing vessels closer to Japan.

In 1978, the central government began building the world’s deepest and most expensive breakwater in Kamaishi’s harbor, a plan intended to protect the city against tsunamis as well as to create jobs.

But the breakwater, which took 30 years to complete, did little to stop Kamaishi’s economic slide. What’s more, after Japan’s economic bubble burst two decades ago, company executives could no longer hire geishas on their expense accounts, said Ms. Kanazawa of Saiwairo.

Saiwairo opened its doors to a larger public, first as a new site for weddings; in recent years, in a reflection of this city’s aging population, it has become a popular setting for memorial services.

“We couldn’t survive on pride alone,” Ms. Kanazawa said.

Still, sometimes the calls came for Ms. Ito, some from old customers, others from new customers reflecting the world’s new economic order.

“About once a month,” Mr. Ito said of the frequency of his aunt’s performances. “Chinese industrialists, among others, now come here.”

And so on March 11, as Ms. Ito was getting ready to perform, the biggest tsunami of her life assailed Kamaishi, tearing apart the breakwater and eventually reaching inland all the way to the house where she and her nephew lived.

As it turned out, after a wall in her house collapsed and she slowly moved to flee, Hiroyuki Maruki, 59, a sake store owner and the president of a group dedicated to preserving an old melody called “Kamaishi Seashore Song,” came by looking for her. “She is the only one who knows how to sing that song,” Mr. Maruki said.

As Mr. Maruki carried Ms. Ito up a hill, she recalled “feeling the soft warmth of his back.”

Mr. Maruki said: “I thought she’d be light, but she was surprisingly heavy. I wondered at one point what was I going to do.”

Having survived yet another tsunami, Ms. Ito said that her regret was that she had been unable to sing that night.

“I’d practiced the night before, and after putting my thoughts together, I thought this song would be all right,” she said, explaining that the song told the story of a young samurai on horseback going to his first, long-awaited battle.

“It ended without my singing,” she said. “It’s such a nice song, too.”

Through April 23, 2011

Renwick

via

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 3, 2011

So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

The deniers’ response was both predictable and revealing; more on that shortly. But first, let’s talk a bit more about that list of witnesses, which raised the same question I and others have had about a number of committee hearings held since the G.O.P. retook control of the House — namely, where do they find these people?

My favorite, still, was Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in which the lead witness was someone best known for writing a book denouncing Abraham Lincoln as a “horrific tyrant” — and for advocating a new secessionist movement as the appropriate response to the “new American fascialistic state.”

The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite the same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that greenhouse gas emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making this up.

Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of “analogies to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably intended to show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental regulation.

But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case.

You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.

Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”

Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for a moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.

For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.

But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

But it’s terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for that’s what it is — has probably ensured that we won’t do anything about climate change until catastrophe is already upon us.

So on second thought, I was wrong when I said that the joke was on the G.O.P.; actually, the joke is on the human race. 

By ROSS PERLIN
NY Times Published: April 2, 2011

ON college campuses, the annual race for summer internships, many of them unpaid, is well under way. But instead of steering students toward the best opportunities and encouraging them to value their work, many institutions of higher learning are complicit in helping companies skirt a nebulous area of labor law.

Colleges and universities have become cheerleaders and enablers of the unpaid internship boom, failing to inform young people of their rights or protect them from the miserly calculus of employers. In hundreds of interviews with interns over the past three years, I found dejected students resigned to working unpaid for summers, semesters and even entire academic years — and, increasingly, to paying for the privilege.

For the students, the problems are less philosophical and legal than practical. In 2007, for instance, Will Batson, a Colgate University student from Augusta, Ga., and a son of two public-interest lawyers, worked as an unpaid, full-time summer intern for WNBC and had to scramble for shelter in New York City.

“It definitely hurt my confidence,” Mr. Batson told me. He recalled crashing on more than 20 floors and couches, being constantly short on cash and fearing he would have to quit and go home. His father, he said, felt like a failure for not being able to help him rent an apartment.

What makes WNBC — whose parent company, General Electric, is valued at more than $200 billion — think it can get away with this? In Mr. Batson’s case, a letter from Colgate, certifying that he was receiving credit for doing the internship. (Now 24, he gave up on journalism and is at a technology start-up. NBC calls its internship program “an important recruiting tool.”)

The uncritical internship fever on college campuses — not to mention the exploitation of graduate student instructors, adjunct faculty members and support staff — is symptomatic of a broader malaise. Far from being the liberal, pro-labor bastions of popular image, universities are often blind to the realities of work in contemporary America.

In politics, film, fashion, journalism and book publishing, unpaid internships are seen as a way to break in. (The New York Times has paid and unpaid interns.) But the phenomenon goes beyond fields seen as glamorous.

Three-quarters of the 10 million students enrolled in America’s four-year colleges and universities will work as interns at least once before graduating, according to the College Employment Research Institute. Between one-third and half will get no compensation for their efforts, a study by the research firm Intern Bridge found. Unpaid interns also lack protection from laws prohibiting racial discrimination and sexual harassment.

The United States Department of Labor says an intern at a for-profit company may work without pay only when the program is similar to that offered in a vocational school, benefits the student, does not displace a regular employee and does not entitle the student to a job; in addition, the employer must derive “no immediate advantage” from the student’s work and both sides must agree that the student is not entitled to wages.

Employers and their lawyers appear to believe that unpaid interns who get academic credit meet those criteria, but the law seems murky; the Labor Department has said that “academic credit alone does not guarantee that the employer is in compliance.”

Fearing a crackdown by regulators, some colleges are asking the government, in essence, to look the other way. In a letter last year, 13 university presidents told the Labor Department, “While we share your concerns about the potential for exploitation, our institutions take great pains to ensure students are placed in secure and productive environments that further their education.”

Far from resisting the exploitation of their students, colleges have made academic credit a commodity. Just look at Menlo College, a business-focused college in northern California, which sold credits to a business called Dream Careers. Menlo grossed $50,000 from the arrangement in 2008, while Dream Careers sold Menlo-accredited internships for as much as $9,500.

To meet the credit requirement of their employers, some interns have essentially had to pay to work for free: shelling out $2,700 to the University of Pennsylvania in the case of an intern at NBC Universal and $1,600 to New York University by an intern at “The Daily Show,” to cite two examples from news reports.

Charging students tuition to work in unpaid positions might be justifiable in some cases — if the college plays a central role in securing the internship and making it a substantive academic experience. But more often, internships are a cheap way for universities to provide credit — cheaper than paying for faculty members, classrooms and equipment.

A survey of more than 700 colleges by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 95 percent allowed the posting of unpaid internships in campus career centers and on college Web sites. And of those colleges, only 30 percent required that their students obtain academic credit for those unpaid internships; the rest, evidently, were willing to overlook potential violations of labor law.

Campus career centers report being swamped; advisers I spoke to flatly denied being able to “monitor and reassess” all placements or even postings, as the 13 university presidents claim to do — their ability to visit students’ workplaces, for instance, is almost nil. They described feeling caught between the demands of employers and interns, and scrambling to make accommodations: issuing vague letters of support for interns to show employers; offering sketchy “internship transcript notations” or “internship certificates”; and even handing out “0.0 credit” — a mysterious work-around by which credit both is and isn’t issued.

Is there a better way? Cooperative education, in which students alternate between tightly integrated classroom time and paid work experience, represents a humane and pragmatic model.

Colleges shouldn’t publicize unpaid internships at for-profit companies. They should discourage internship requirements for graduation — common practice in communications, psychology, social work and criminology. They should stop charging students to work without pay — and ensure that the currency of academic credit, already cheapened by internships, doesn’t lose all its value.

To be sure, the unpaid internship is only part of a phenomenon that includes the growing numbers of temps, freelancers, adjuncts, self-employed “entrepreneurs” and other low-wage or precariously employed workers who live gig by gig. The academy should critique, not amplify, those trends.

While higher education has tried to stand for fairness in the past few decades through affirmative action and financial aid, the internship boom gives the well-to-do a foot in the door while consigning the less well-off to dead-end temporary jobs. Colleges have turned internships into a prerequisite for the professional world but have neither ensured equal access to these opportunities, nor insisted on fair wages for honest work.