Less War, More Britney?

I laugh when people bray loudly to me about the decline of the news media, and the surge of celebrity news, because A) I know that the cult of personality you see replacing news these days is not an unwelcome media trend but a long-term, publicly underwritten, deliberate distraction from the real, ugly and undoctored news.

And B) I'm a career journalist who freelances on the fringes of the staggering media giant for good reason.

Yes, the public dutifully complains about the overexposed TomKat and Bradgelina power couples. But you know how it celebrates when reality is pre-empted by Britney's baldness.

Why? Because the reader is merely winking at the image-maker behind the media curtain replacing war coverage with Paris Hilton uncovered.

And don't just blame the weak-kneed industry leaders for the sharp shift from hard news to infotainment. They can see as well as you can that the reader does not demand quality reporting and news analysis anymore.

Today's overstimulated reader buys papers and watches newscasts with the largest percentages of celebrity news and pretty faces so he doesn't have to think about genocide in Darfur, or overhyped reports of WMD in Iraq, or anything really important.

And, no, it's not like those readers are just mindlessly distracted by the pretty people. The readers are nothing short of entrapping the bad boys and sex kittens in the public lens to eclipse an ugly reality.

There wasn't an attack of the 50-foot Anna Nicole Smith. The public made her a giant, and it's only a matter of time before they drag their next tragic beauty into the street.

Hopefully it won't be a fringe freelancer trying to conjure critical thinking skills.

The problem is that more britney doesn't mean less war, it means war and britney. That would make quite a picasso.

rating your ability to navigate your inner space

Being out sick with the flu, and thinking of all the things I'd do, were I well, I spent precious time of mine rating artwork on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/showdown/index/101374.
I noticed I was initially rating according to artist's ability to navigate their inner space, get deep into their inner layers, define these layers, and take note of their obstacle archetypes and artifacts, all the things stopping us.
Being an artist frustrated about why I don't draw when the happy fact is that I can, and can well, I made amazingly clairvoyant findings that will help me: people failing to get inside at all, and drawing their mundane and happy artifacts and archetypes boldly and in color (if they had the mixing skills) like Betty Crocker Graffiti on crockery. There was one that was no more than graffiti, bothersome in that this person in my mind can not see beyond surfaces to get to the bottom of what drives them. The can only make weak superficial gestures towards art, to me, the excavation of internal meaning.
What has always bothered me about folk art, or art that has only one dimension, is the single subject in a world so cluttered. This art celebrates single images, but they have little meaning without context. That has always ground at me, like my nagging nightmare of fat then skinny people alternating like trees I can't get between or navigate away from. Then there were the pieces I should like to emulate the artist's ability to envision their obstacles, their mental candy, and go deep into the layers, sucking others in with them. I could see pictures I wanted to make, the prone but alert malamute large in perspective to the howling timber wolf scaled down in the background along a chasm running liike a stream through my picture. No color.
And why so much flesh, the mediocre artist never get beyond it to their subject's religion.
And the landscapes, an education in excavation lost on those with simple eyes and lacking critical judgement.
Most people want to find beautywithout excavating, without working, without questioning. They want credit for seeing the beauty without understanding it.