Today's Stories

October 22, 2009

Dan Pearson /
Kathy Kelly
The Rotten Fruits of War

October 21, 2009

Pam Martens
The Next Financial Crisis Hits Wall Street: Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures

Linn Washington, Jr.
A Kafkaesque Deportation

Liaquat Ali Khan
Now Pakistan: Sequential Destruction of Muslim Nations

D. K. Wilson
Rush Limbaugh and the NFL

Franklin Lamb
Syria's Golan Heights

Norman Solomon
Uncle Sam in Afghanistan

Stephen Fleischman
Hypocrisy Unbridled

Patrice Higonnet
On Harvard's Financial Crisis

Binoy Kampmark
Herta Müller's Nobel

Kevin Coval /
Josh Healey
Searching for a Minyan

Website of the Day
How Wall Street is Making Its Bilions

October 20, 2009

Sharon Smith
Et Tu, Codepink?

Tariq Ali
Farce in Kabul, Tragedy in Pakistan

Mark Brenner
Pensions: the Next Casualty of Wall Street

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Adoption of the Goldstone Report: What Does It Mean?

Michael D. Yates
Down in the Valley With Cesar: Power, Paranoia and Purges in the UFW

Dean Baker
Does Citibank Need China?

Dave Lindorff
Depleted Uranium Weapons: Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan are No Joke

John Ross
Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica, II

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: a Very Important Liar

Kevin Zeese
Can the Democrats Avoid a Populist Health Care Rebellion?

Gilad Atzmon
Autumn in Shanghai

Website of the Day
A Message From the Gyre

October 19, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Dollar Will Not Crash

Greg Moses
The Cash Cops of Tenaha

John Ross
Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica

Michael Donnelly
Outside Agitator

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Dick's Fringe Army: Tea Baggers and Birchers?

Eric Walberg
The Battle in Canada

Russell Mokhiber
Pennsylvania, First in the Nation for Single Payer?

Barbara Rose Johnston
War, Peace and the Obamajority

John V. Whitbeck
Zionism: an Anti-Semite's Dream?

Christopher Ketcham
Swine Fools

Website of the Day
Greenspan: Break Up the Big Banks?

October 16-18, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
White House v. Fox News: a War Obama Can Win

Saul Landau
Autumn of the Patriarch

Paul Craig Roberts
The Rich Have Stolen the Economy

Carl Ginsburg
Where $18 an Hour is Too Much

Ralph Nader
Barney Frank the Bankers' Consort

Nikolas Kozloff
Rainforest Beef, Factory Farms and Anthony Bourdain's War on Vegetarians

Carlo Galli
Berlusconi: Still Doing Nothing, Still There

Dave Lindorff
Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

Catherine Rottenberg / Neve Gordon
Educating Children in War Zones

Marshall Auerback
Dollar Spasms

Nicola Nasser
The Realistic Way Out of Iraq

Windy Cooler
The Ghost of John Brown

James L. Secor
Why I Miss China

Ron Jacobs
Escalation Unopposed

Wes Jackson
A Way of Knowing

Jesse Lerner-Kinglake
Global Food Fight

David Ker Thomson Against Leaders

Missy Beattie
Dinner With the President

Emily Ratner
Taping Our Mouths Shut to Scream Out Our Dissent

Stephen Martin
The Scorched Earth Mindset of the International Banker

Michael Snedeker
"A Place of Greater Safety"

Charles R. Larson
Cheeta: the Last of the Hollywood High-Rollers

David Yearsley
Judith Leyster's Sensuous Passions

Peter Stone Brown
It's a Bob Christmas for Halloween

Poets' Basement
Keeler, Beatty and Anderson

Website of the Weekend
Elements of Nature

October 15, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
Our Cheap Politicians

Brian M. Downing
Rethinking the Afghan Insurgency

Ramzy Baroud
Abbas and the Goldstone Report: Our Shame is Complete

Danny Weil
A Neo-Liberal Arts Education: Diploma Mills and Debt Peonage

M. Idrees Ahmad
Return to Peshawar: a Journey Home

Margaret Kimberley
Michelle's Family Tree

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: Which Side Are You On?

Harvey Wasserman
Nuking the Climate Bill

Nirmal Ghosh
A Tale of Two Protocols: How Montreal Could Save Us From the Mire of Kyoto

Charles R. Larson
Sarah Palin Bears It All

Website of the Day
Tortured Law

October 14, 2009

Michael Neumann
Fearsome Words? a Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict

M. Reza Pirbhai
Fighting the Taliban: What, Exactly, is Being Fought in Afghanistan?

Gareth Porter
Hawks Play Up the Taliban's Ties to Al Qaeda

Paul Craig Roberts
War Criminals Are Becoming Arbiters of the Law

John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon

Ralph Nader
The CBO's Flawed Report on Medical Malpractice

Dean Baker
Won't You Please Come to Chicago to Greet the Bankers?

Charles Modiano
White Silence: Where Does Brett Favre Stand on Rush Limbaugh?

Nadia Hijab
Abandoning "Women and Children"

Walter Brasch
An Extension of Her Motherhood: Sherry Carpenter, Journalist and Animal Care Provider

Website of the Day
Nader: Obama Has a "Concessionary Personality"

October 13, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Putting the Spine Back in the Commonwealth

Shamus Cooke
What Obama Isn't Telling American Workers

John Ross
War on Mexican Women

Brendan Cooney
Ask Awal Khan About Obama's Prize

Frida Berrigan
Operation Enduring Detentions: Losing the Moral High Ground

Yves Engler
Is Canada More Pro-Israel Than the US?

David Macaray
Why the Government Fears Unions

Dave Lindorff
Democrats: Selling Out, But Still Getting Screwed

Mark Weisbrot
Occupying Afghanistan is Making Things Worse

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
History Repeats Itself

Binoy Kampmark
That Dirty Colonial War

Website of the Day
The Health Insurance Industry's Latest Doublecross

October 12, 2009

Pam Martens
Secret Deal Between Wall Street and Washington Shines a Harsh Light on Federal Housing Agency

Mike Whitney
A Dollar Rout or More Bernanke Trickery?

Martha Rosenberg
Yale Lab Tech Causes Two Problems for Animal Researchers

Jessica Arents
The Price of Peace: Our Arrest at the White House

Eamonn McCann
Massacre in Ireland, Massacre in Iraq

Bill Hatch
Dairy Industry Goes Down the Tubes

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time for a Timetable in Afghanistan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Siren Song of World Praise

Gideon Levy
Obama's Betrayed Mission in the Middle East

Iyad Burnat
Why Does Obama Get a Prize and Bush Got Shoes?

Alan Cabal
Why Obama Deserves the Nobel

Dan Bacher
The Astroturf Method

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help

October 9-11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
War and Peace

James Bovard
Eight Years of Big Lies on Afghanistan

Kathleen and Bill Christison
New Crisis Developing in Palestine

Andy Worthington
Congressional Depravity on Gitmo

Marc Levy
Talking Dirty to the Kids

Tariq Ali
Ahmed Rashid's War

Mike Whitney
The Securitization Boondoggle

Paul Craig Roberts
Warmonger Wins Peace Prize

Alan Nasser
Cockeyed Economics

Jack Z. Bratich
The Twitterest Pill: Policing Dissent in the Information Age

Steve Breyman
Time for a War Tax

David Michael Green
A Hapless Presidency

Dave Lindorff
The WTF Prize

Paul Buchheit
Fear of the Rich

Jim Goodman
Feedlots and E. Coli

Missy Beattie
Theater of the Absurd

Michael Leonardi
Ships of Poison

Nadia Hijab
The Plight of the Right of Return

Mel Packer
The Crackdown on Pittsburgh

David Macaray
The Raiding Game

James T. Phillips
Getting Burned

Charles R. Larson
One Man's Walk Through Hell

Michael Donnelly
Behind the Capitalist Curtain

David Yearsley
The Biggest Blot on Mel Gibson's Rap Sheet

Lorenzo Wolff
Rap That Threatens ... and Endures

Poets' Basement
Heyen, Ames and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Jobs Conference

October 8, 2009

Saul Landau
A Late September Morning With Fidel

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Dark Omens for the US in Afghanistan

Linn Washington, Jr.
Pot and Perversion: Judicial Antics Expose Drug War Insanity

Marshall Auerback
Neo-Classical Economics Misses What Matters

Dave Lindorff
A Nation of Snoops

David Rosen
Bankrupt Morality: the Staying Power of Republican Sinners

Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee
The Bear Essentials: New Thinking Needed to Save BC's Salmon and Grizzlies

John V. Walsh
Remembering Hinton's Fanshen

Stewart Lawrence
The Edwards / Hunter Affair Reconsidered

Charles R. Larson
Conservatives in the Sandbox

Website of the Day
Et Tu, Code Pink?

October 7, 2009

Brendan Cooney
Are Republicans Breaking US Law in Honduras?

Paul Craig Roberts
Dead Labor: Marx and Lenin Reconsidered

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Recovery: Unemployment Up, Wages Down (But the Banks Have Been Saved ... Sort Of)

Jonathan Cook
A Third Intifada?

John Stanton
HTS: Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harms Way

Joanne Mariner
Tortured Language

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cherry Blossoms

Stephen Lendman
The Gaza War's Effect on Women

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time to Draw Down in Afghanistan

Mary Lynn Cramer
Doublespeak on Health Care

Website of the Day
How to Bag a Wolf by Aerial Assault

October 6, 2009

Mike Whitney
Dollar Hysteria: Is the Sky Really Falling?

Gareth Porter
The Iranian Rift in the IAEA: Leaked Paper Based on Disputed Intel

Jonathan Cook
How Israel Buried the UN's War Crime Probe

Boris Kagarlitsky
My Hour as Talking Head in Moscow

Iain Boal
The New Crisis at Pacifica

Ron Jacobs
Why Are We in Afghanistan?

John Ross
Wave of Anarchist Bombings Strikes Mexico

Michael Dickinson
Panic in Istanbul: Smoke, Mayhem and the World Bank

Stephen Fleischman
Beware the Predator

Ira Glunts
The Audacity of Nope

Missy Beattie
Outside Looking In

Website of the Day
Round Up the Usual Suspects

October 5, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families While Partnering with a Federal Agency

Mike Whitney
Dead Man Walking: Welcome to the US Economy

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Feds Imprison the Innocent

Harry Browne
Ireland Says, "Yes, Please"

Sara Mann
My Little Town: Nothin' But the Dead and Dyin'

Omar Barghouti
Dissolve the Palestinian Authority

Shamus Cooke
A Jobless Recovery?

Brenda Norrell
A Dirty New Low for Peabody Coal

Fred Gardner
Situation NORML: Reconciling Medical Pot Use and Legalization

Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap

Website of the Day
In Goldman Sachs We Trust?

October 2-4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Geezer Renditions

Saul Landau
News From Raul Castro

Diana Johnstone
After the German Elections: Is Socialism Really Dead in Europe?

Greg Moses
Cramming for the Downside

William Blum
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Another Cold War Myth

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Nuclear Program: Where's the Proof?

Russell Mokhiber
Welcome Back, Michael Moore

John Ross
Chomsky in Mexico

Ellen Brown
IMF Catapults From Shunned Agency to Global Central Bank

David Ker Thomson
Cop Shocks

David Macaray
The Audacity of Toyota

Gary Engler
Unions in a Rut

Robert Fantina
Meet the New Boss (Same as the Old Boss)

Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer
Pittsburgh: Still a (Coal) Company Town

Anthony Papa
Here is Your Chance to Help End the Failed War on Drugs

Joe Allen
The Good Wife: Bad View of a Corrupt System

Harry Browne
Tarantino Scalps His Audience

Ron Jacobs
Collective Fiction

Charles R. Larson
Cultural Warriors: Austrialian Aboriginal Art Triennial

David Yearsley
Hanns Eisler's Great National Anthem for East Germany is Available: Make It America's

Poets' Basement
Taylor, Gardner and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Wrongful Convictions of Youth

October 22, 2009

A Volte-Face with a Commercial Advantage

What is Damien Hirst Playing At?

By CHARLES THOMSON

"I always thought painting was the best thing to do … I don’t like conceptual art".  This is a sentiment felt by many people, and one of the main practitioners of conceptual art they might have in mind is Damien Hirst, particularly for his $12 million pickled shark, now on loan display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It is therefore astonishing that the statement was made recently by Hirst himself.

It is just as well that he said it after, and not before, his Sotheby's auction in September 2008, which was composed of the conceptual art he doesn't like and which over two days netted £115 million (then $199 million).  Its centre piece was The Golden Calf, a calf with gold-plated horns and hooves preserved in formaldehyde. This was, one might think, a clear enough insult to the clientele about the falseness of their idolatry, but it merely succeeded in encouraging them, and the calf was bought for £10.3 million, beating Hirst's previous auction record and helping him to the position of, according to Andrew Graham-Dixon in The Sunday Telegraph, the world's richest ever living artist.

Hirst's latest statement does not seem on the face of it to be very commercially astute. It brings to mind Gerald Ratner, who by 1989 could claim to be the world’s biggest jeweller with 2,000 shops on two continents and 80% of the UK market. He had built up the family jewellery business to a billion pounds a year turnover by eschewing the stuffy traditions of the trade and emblazoning his high street shops with vulgar day-glo "sale" signs offering continual bargains. In 1991 he made a speech, which proved to be his undoing, during the Institute of Directors annual conference at the Albert Hall in London.

He launched into a joke that his shops "sold a pair of earrings for under a pound, which is cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks & Spencer, but probably wouldn't last as long".  This brings to mind (apart from the price, that is) Hirst's shark, which had to be replaced after the original rotted.  Ratner's commercial suicide came when he proceeded to mention the firm's cut-glass sherry decanters, on sale for £4.95, and wise-cracked, "People say, 'How can you sell this for such a low price?', I say, 'because it's total crap'."  The Daily Mirror followed up with a front page headline, "You 22 carat gold mugs".  Ratners rapidly lost customers and  £500 million in value. The public didn't mind buying cheap crap and deluding themselves that they were getting the real McCoy for a bargain, but they weren't prepared to play along if the vendor was going to point out the reality to them.

Hirst, however, is in a different financial position. Ratner undermined his current stock. Hirst is devaluing a discontinued range. His stunning aversion to the genre through which he made his fame and fortune is to be found in the catalogue text of his new show, No Love Lost, staged in the musty museum setting of the Wallace Collection in London's Manchester Square amongst the quiet streets behind Selfridges on Oxford Street. The Museum is famed for its fine collection of 17th and 18th paintings, as well as its ceramics and armour.

Here Hirst is exhibiting for the first time paintings done by his own hand. (Previously exhibited paintings "by" Hirst were physically executed by assistants or the arbitrariness of a rapidly revolving turntable.)  He sees the 2008 Sotheby's auction as marking the end of his previous oeuvre and this show as the new direction.  Should his derogatory remark prompt a chain reaction which crashes the conceptual market and boosts that for painting, it can only be to his current advantage, though the effect on the holdings of his customers to date will be a different matter.

If the critics are anything to go by, this is not likely to happen. They  have arisen with all the venom they can muster to condemn the paintings as "the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student" (Tom Lubbock, The Independent), "amateurish and adolescent" (Adrian Searle, The Guardian), "dreadful" (Rachel Campbell-Johnson, The Times) and "fucking dreadful" (Brian Sewell, Evening Standard).  I found the work a distinct improvement on anything else Hirst has done to date, and was surprised to discover I could not only understand a lot more about what he was saying, but appreciate the smaller sized works, although the bigger ones generally overstretched his abilities, with the exception of an expansive and even beautiful flower painting.  (Beauty is only beginning to creep back as an art critical term at the moment.)  

However, the function of critics nowadays is simply to indicate what is important by the amount of space they give it, and they have given Hirst star billing. What they actually say is irrelevant, although "bad" reviews are probably preferable for the notoriety and controversy they bestow, which generate far more interest than a bland accolade.  Half the work in Hirst's show is already owned by Ukrainian steel billionaire, Victor Pinchuk, who has previously shown the paintings in Kiev.  The price he paid is circulating on the grapevine as £50 million.  More paintings by Hirst will go on show in the White Cube gallery next month with single panels priced up to £2.5 million and triptychs around £10 million. (Knock off three or four noughts and you would get a more fitting price.)

An advertising executive, with whom I entered into a chance conversation whilst wandering around Hirst's show, had no doubt that the new stance was simple expediency to promote and sell the latest output.  I'm not sure I could so confidently dismiss out of hand any genuine creative motive on Hirst's part, although I note that, despite his now saying that he has always wanted to paint, in 1997 he was quoted in The Penguin Book of Art Writing: "The process of painting is meaningless, old-fashioned.  Today there are better ways for artists to communicate." But then, of course, he had something different to sell.

Charles Thomson is co-founder of the Stuckists art group
www.stuckism.com

References

Ratner on Ratner
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/

Prawn sandwich quote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3199822.stm

Sherry decanter quote:
http://www.independent.co.uk

Pinchuk owns half the paintings in the Wallace Collection show:
http://www.bloomberg.com/

Hirst painting prices at White Cube show, November 2009:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/

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