Word-for-word my thoughts when I first heard of fowl slaughterer cum-performance artist Miguel Suarez and his controversial “work.” Canadian art student Suarez slaughtered a live chicken in an art school cafeteria without warning students who were trying their best to keep down their lunch last April 18.

Tacky an offensive? Yes, but not nearly as bad as Yale art student Aliza Shvarts, who claimed to serially self-abort as a performance/installation project.

Illegal? Possibly, since the university isn’t licensed as an abattoir. Still no charges were filed by police.

But is it art?

Ah, there lies the rub. It depends whom you ask, but according to current rules of engagement in the arts, if a person claims to be an artist, we are bound to seriously consider their claims until proven otherwise (which I guess means until they denounce art in favor of moving to Vanuatu to join the Prince Philip Movement – or running a chicken farm).

No surprise that the world is reacting with more hysteria over the demise of a Canadian fowl than a mound of dead fetuses. I suspect the hue and cry over chicken murder is psychologically akin to the publicity baby butcher Kermit Gosnell finally received. We know somewhere creatures are dying for our dinner but have no problem as long as the blood isn’t splattering on our Nikes. Similarly it’s easy to deny the reality of tormented, bloody babies when late term abortion is legal, contained and not mentioned in polite society. Gosnell’s trial ripped that veil to pieces … at least until the press is diverted elsewhere.

But could chicken-killing be art?

Apparently officials at Alberta College of Art + Design, or ACBA, thought not, as they swiftly dismissed Gordon Ferguson, a 32-year veteran art instructor who was overseeing the “event.” A few weeks later this decision was reversed under trainloads of pressure by artists and students who protested a lack of “academic freedom.” In his defense, Ferguson wished he “had a greater opportunity to advise and support his student” before he began the performance.

But Suarez’ stuff was tame compared to the animal “snuff film” that preceded him in Canada by a decade. In 2001 Jesse Power and two other men videoed the skinning and torture of a live cat as an “art project.” If the morons expected to win awards, they were sadly surprised by the national outpouring of hate, rants and death threats.

“This isn’t art” declared Judge Ted Ormston, the assigned jurist.

A psychiatrist in Power’s trial perceived him an “an utterly modern blockhead – a vegan, art student and political activist” who felt entitled to any action that furthered his thesis, however immoral or illegal. In his case he hadn’t quite finished up, as he planned to eat the poor thing later – as a protest against eating meat of course.

While many other performance/installation art pieces have featured more gore and violence, obviously the ACBA wanted to establish a boundary in Suarez’ case. Whether over violence, trauma, public safety, squeamishness, legal threats or animal rights, I don’t know. But current philosophy seems to run “if it’s art” there can be no legitimate boundaries or limitations imposed on artists … with rare exceptions.

These are two entirely different issues, but more and more they are intertwined. Russian art activists Voina (War) overturned police cars, set fires and rioted as political protest. Criminal enough to land a spot on Interpol’s wanted list, ironically they were simultaneously awarded an “Innovation Prize” in 2011 for visual art by the Russian establishment – the Ministry of Culture itself.

Putting aside whether protests are deserved or not, could vandalism and political activity in itself be “art?” This is being hotly debated across the world, as authorities clash with artists who claim artistic immunity for virtually everything.

A literal example of the struggle to build lines of demarcation between art and political action occurred in 2012 between artist Zhao Zhao and the Chinese government. A protégé of Ai Wei Wei and possible heir to his political clout, Zhou experience the wrath of the state when a boatload of his art was confiscated and destroyed. The official reason given? “It isn’t art.” When the Chinese government has power to decide if a statue of a dismantled policeman is art, their findings are predictable.

If political action plain and undecorated qualifies as art, why can’t everything else? All human activities at their heights qualify as “arts” or “sciences,” but until recently the term “artist” was reserved for creative, fine arts only. This obscures and mystifies culture and is a great legal loophole too.

Could a bad mechanic claim the oil he didn’t replace was a “statement against global warming and industrial waste”? A neighboring meth lab is an “in vivo art-installation referencing altered states in relation to authoritarian systems.”

Gay marriage as performance art? It’s interesting to live in such a time that any absurdity you mentally conjure … actually exists somewhere. As I speak two “married” gay men are busily engaged in an art performance so viewers can “contemplate gay marriage, queer assimilation and fetishization of the suburbs.”

Wow, I’ve always wanted to do that. Thanks guys, or whatever you consider yourselves now.

The Village Voice gushes over “A Marriage” for enacting little domestic activities together like wearing masks and speaking into inflated plastic bags – things all suburbanites do. So precious.

Performance and installation art sometimes blurs boundaries in other directions, such as pornography. Nudity is a tradition in art, but since the 1970s performance artists such Vito Acconci thought it might make their art more memorable if they just masturbated during their show. By 2008 Leah Aron working as “Amber Alert” ditched the art and just stripped while playing an X-rated video involving things I could not mention here.

Her statement – doubling as an excuse to be taken seriously – claims she is navigating the “onerous challenge” of gender norms and societal expectations while appropriating “pervasive media images and cultural messages” that assault the senses.
In other words, a stripper with airs.

Is it art? It is if academics, galleries and museums say it is and if other artists accept it as such. And look who’s working her way up to the next seat of cultural clout where such issues are debated and codified. It’s the Mistress of Miscarriage and Anti-Mother, Aliza Shvarts, currently working her way to a Ph.D. in performance studies at NYU.

Aliza Shvarts

Just to make it clear that although she will earn a Ph.D. Shvarts has no conception of how art is classically defined, she issued this statement in defense of her series of lies, toying with human life and causing legal problems for Yale: “I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity.”

Apparently Shvarts skipped out the day they taught on aesthetics in Art Appreciation 101, leading her to believe art is only a commercial application or a political one.

Although performance and installation art can be beautiful, profound and memorable, it is too often overlaid with commercial entertainment and circus oddities. Imagine Ripley’s meets Cage Fighter meets Deep Throat meets Talent Show in Vegas – with scholarly proclamations of course.

Artists will push the boundaries of content, subject and media in their art and galleries, and academics tend to accept them at face value without much questioning. Generally a plausible artist’s statement is enough to hail chicken killing, auto lubrication or coughing as an art form. The inertia comes from the public when common sense and traditional and social mores are stomped a little too hard to keep them from kicking back.

Reticence from the masses is a good thing in the long run, because it keeps artists from being too infatuated with their own reflection and forces them to consider their audience, which is often public.

When audience reaction is totally ignored, art collapses into cynical, personal therapy – a kind of mindless exhibitionism. Even more so “performance art,” which implies a designated a) performer and b) observer. Examples of performance art gone bad are everywhere, with one of the worst wandering the streets of Madrid projecting huge shadows of his penis onto sides of buildings – because he can.

Nude Jaime del Val may seem mad, self-obsessed and people may hide their children in his vicinity, but he has an artist’s statement and he hasn’t been arrested. As a “pangender cyborg” he uses “organs of power” (buildings) as a means to protest homophobia, surveillance, control and consumer society.

Undoubtedly del Val will have the enthusiastic support of Aliza Shvarts, her mentors at Yale and NYU and supporters of cat skinners everywhere.

So it’s art.

Stolen art is more likely to originate in Europe, Latin America or the East but often ends up in U.S. markets, so the FBI is busily involved. One massive exception was the largest art heist to date, from our own Isabelle Gardner museum in Boston in 1990. Built in the style of a cozy 5th-century Venetian palace, it’s hard to believe that 13 paintings worth $500 million were easily walked off the property by two phony policemen in a leisurely 80-minute soiree there.

Although the paintings seem to have vanished entirely, signs of hope remain at the Gardner. Their empty frames linger on museum walls symbolizing the future return of the Rembrandt, Vermeer and other priceless works of art. An aggressive campaign by district attorneys, the FBI, Interpol and art agencies is re-publicizing the thefts and hoping to re-heat this cold case.

The drama is playing out in the press right now, as publicity is ramped up by restating a $5-million reward for information leading to return of the work and a flurry of press conferences. Adding to the chatter is a trail of mafia suspects who can’t remember a thing and are comfortably dying of old age while they refuse to talk.

One is James “Whitey” Bulger, the most publicized mobster since Al Capone and target of a decades long international manhunt. Bulger, a major mafia figure, may well know who has the loot but isn’t talking. In spite of denials Bulger had ties to all Boston suspects, living and dead, and had past ties to the Irish Republican Army, which was pressing for stolen art to increase its coffers about that time.

Since his capture, he almost certainly has been questioned on the Gardner theft, but there will be no plea deals in return for art, according to officials connected with his case.

Donald K. Stern, former U.S. attorney who led both the manhunt for Bulger and the Gardner case till 2001 explained why: “These charges are just too serious, too overwhelming for there to be any consideration of release.”

The FBI will consider immunity for those involved in the heist in return for the art, but 19 dead bodies is a deal breaker.

The Gardner Museum should have learned to zip things thing up a little tighter after a high school student managed to steal a Rembrandt self-portrait from them in 1981 by simply breaking a light bulb and waltzing off. Apparently the student’s adventure with the purloined Rembrandt didn’t last much past the exit according to Anthony Amore, security expert for the Gardner, who has been much featured in the press lately.

The student bandit’s redux just came out last spring as a group of Johannesburg thieves posing as fascinated art students robbed the Pretoria Art Museum at gunpoint after dutifully paying their admission. They were picky, choosing $2 billion worth of paintings from South Africans such as Irma Stern, which were found a few days later in private cemetery, oddly enough.

"The Concert," by Vermeer, stolen from the Gardner

It’s also been a good year for the recovery of stolen art, should you have a missing Vermeer or a white gold and diamond tiara. The Duchess of Argyll lost some luggage with several family treasures at Glasgow Airport in 2006 and recovered most of them last June when she saw them offered in an auction catalog. Strangely, her gems had been sold for charity as unclaimed property held by the British Airports Association. Did anyone actually bother to look in lost luggage first? At any rate, the airport staff must be stellar there.

For victims of art theft the horizon is looking brighter, and it’s promising to get better as groups such as Art Loss Register aid the cause. Currently the ALR is world’s largest international private database of stolen, missing and looted artwork. As they add to their vast digital inventory, sellers and buyers find a place to check on the provenance of a piece. ALR also promises to help make life tougher on thieves, who have to do something with the stuff once they’ve nicked it.

Just months ago a pilfered Matisse valued at $1 million was returned to the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm due to the expert sleuthing of Christopher A. Marinello, a lawyer working with ALR in London. He watched the art market for 22 years but finally it floated to the surface. Marinello has been intercepting stolen art en route to other owners at quite a pace, often working with Interpol or the FBI.

Perhaps the tale of Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of DoubleLine Capital LP and his $20-$39 million worth of stolen art and goods is less inspiring. Thieves stole modern art and a Porsche last year from Gundlach , legendary for his investments as well as the huge stash of pornography, alcohol, drugs and “sexual devices,” which lead to his firing from TCW.

I include him for his clever tactics in finding the perps, which apparently worked. Immediately after offering a $200,000 reward, Gundlach had another idea. Some of the paintings were publicly known to have come from his grandmother. He told police look up recent Google searches for “Helen Fuchs,” and lo and behold there were only two, Gundlach and the art thieves.

Generally, stolen art is sold for pennies on the dollar, so paper worth translates to much less in the real life of a crook. The FBI and Interpol are conducting a big PR campaign at the moment aimed at art thieves and those considering it as a career move. They point out that almost no one will buy instantly recognizable art off the street unless your name is Verne or Saatchi. Walking into a gallery and claiming the Goya was littering your great aunt’s basement is not likely to fly far. Holding it ransom rarely works either. For that reason art gets stashed in private homes and storage lockers getting moldy and warped for decades until the hue and cry dies down.

Stealing art still appeals to criminals, because they assume they will encounter less resistance and generally don’t end up harming anyone. There are a few exceptions, however, such as the unfortunate case of a Belgian collector who was seriously injured by home intruders and art robbers last December. Traditionally art thieves only began to carry weapons quite recently, and the days we can count on the genteel art thief may be gone.

Stolen art is also is a flooded market, with approximately 350,000 works floating around the globe. As a last resort art is sometimes traded between crime rings, cartel leaders or terrorists as a kind of black market currency for guns or drugs.

Marinello noted that “stolen artwork has no real value in the legitimate marketplace and will eventually resurface … it’s just a matter of waiting it out.”

But wait! News of the world’s art heists wouldn’t be complete without he tale of the “sleeping art thief.” Yes, it is possible to have a law degree, be in a lucid conversation at cocktail party, slip out and steal art next door and be sleeping the entire time.

This is what a court in Australia ruled in the case of lawyer Michael Gerard Sullivan, who stole art by James Willebrant in 2008 and is now an entirely free man due to his strange afflictions. Yes, a team of highly imaginative lawyers and psychologists fabricated an entirely new permutation of disorder for the situation (fortunately for Sullivan) who was “assuming the identity of an art thief.”

Sullivan admits he took the objects (CCTV recorded him doing it and they were in his home) but denied it all because he “didn’t remember.” Not a bit. Two psychiatric reports claim he was “suffering from a case of dissociative disorder, dissociative amnesia at the time that led to him ‘assuming the identity of an art thief’ and then forgetting” that he committed the theft.

Not only is Sullivan’s memory to blame, but also his terribly sensitive nature. Dissociative amnesia causes persons to forget details of a “traumatic or stressful event” and can last from a few days to one or more years. I’d assume, though, that the “traumatic event” was done to you, not by you, but what do I know? I’m not a lawyer or a psychiatrist.

Anyway, the judge was convinced, and because of no prior records of pathological lying, deception or greed, Sullivan is free to continue practice at Leahy Lewin Nutley Sullivan in Papua New Guinea. At least Willebrant got his pieces back, and now all’s well with the art world.

Rembrandt's actual "The Return of the Prodigal Son"

“I must study politics and war, that my sons may study mathematics and philosophy … in order to give their children the right to study painting, poetry, music and architecture.”

John Q. Adams said this, the son of John Adams who along with John Hancock and other luminaries founded our very own American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the middle of a Revolution. They hoped America would continue the European tradition of formally supporting art, science and scholarship.

When that didn’t happen, an exodus of art students fled to Europe until private and state universities took up the slack more recently.

I’ve been notice noticing how American universities have worked as traditional academies of art for a long a time, but was this a good idea or a cultural disaster?

Ever since a conversation with an artist-academic ended with her repeated, patronizing edict, “You cannot say that,” over some minor, politically incorrect trespass, I’ve been a bit sulky over the entire university/art shtick – a reasonable response to arrogant instructors who mistake the entire world for their little oyster and all dissenters as wee bits of sand.

Some modern, democratized incarnation of “The Royal Society of Arts” was needed here, and a bazillion schools and public universities were sucked into the vacuum. Artists required a place to learn their craft and an opportunity to be critiqued by others. In the best situations they find true mentors and encouragement. Critics and historians must likewise prove their stuff, and both professions are closer to academic studies anyway. Pieces of impressive paper always help.

It’s hard to say how well this giant networked “Academy” is working, because it’s so loosely knit and no one represents all the artists in the process. But how would someone like Rembrandt fare in the average, highly politicized art school of the 21st century? Not so well I think.

First there’s the fact that he was a fervent Christian believer, and many of his subjects were biblical. Talking about that isn’t prohibited – it’s just extremely not encouraged.

Imagine the scene. Rembrandt is painting “Return of the Prodigal” and has found an Orthodox Jew for a model. Outside his small studio space in a New York university, the walls are plastered with calls to boycott Israeli products and calls for destruction of the “fascist Zionist state.” From the window they hear Mohammed Hafiz Khan, allowed by the college to rant against U.S. Christians, all Jews and the American military – with a megaphone. Rembrandt and Abe are doing their best to ignore it, but he includes one of the hate posters in the background of the painting, just for authenticity.

Later in a group critique session, Rembrandt is asked about his “The Return of the Prodigal Son”:

“How does this scene speak to competing and dualist belief systems?”

“Touching, but entirely patriarchal scene. Wouldn’t it would be stronger if all authority figures and family archetypes weren’t male?”

“This clearly reflects starving Proletariat masses returning to beg at the feet of powerful Capitalists in times of famine and civil unrest.”

Rembrandt is speechless. Good thing he speaks only Dutch, at least as far as they are concerned.

"New" and "improved" Rembrandt

Considering the free-spirited nature of Americans, it’s no surprise our artists didn’t fancy courting permission and currying favors from Powers That Be. Europe’s artists deserted their academy in droves over rigid controls of style and content a century ago. Many rejected the concept of “authority” entirely, especially of the state and identified the old academy with the unjust oppressive orders of the past.

Now the new “Art Academy” (public and private U.S. schools combined) have come full circle, or more specifically, 180 degrees to the other side with the same attitude, but very different politics and ethics.

An almost unbearable political correctness envelopes so many institutions like a cloud of mustard gas, and it is particularly noxious to the arts. Virtually every field of study is filtered through screens of required Marxist, feminist, queer, anti-imperialist/patriarchal, deconstructed and post-colonial nonsense like they were sifting for gold. Fortunately, this isn’t always the case, and students still manage to learn basic composition and theory in spite of the best efforts of crusading leftist professors.

Ironically, while ridiculing the constraints and proprieties of neo-classical art academies, they’ve re-created a hybrid Frankenstein with a diploma. The rotted remains of dead tradition form the resurrected academy – but only the left side now. The new academics have zero tolerance for cultural deviants. The “questions which must not be voiced” are equivalent to Victorian “unmentionables,” and the strident nationalism of the original academy is replaced with enforced “diversity” or else.

Correct answers lead to the promised land of matriculation, so best learn your anti-Western lessons and mind your post-Letitia Baldridge manners, particularly if you’re reaching for a higher degree. That’s where candidates start dropping like flies if their worldviews are incongruent with the institution. Most universities or art schools would never admit it, but I have letters from instructors bemoaning the political intrigue they slog through all day hoping not to be singled out or attacked for their conservative views.

Just as kings sponsored Royal Art Academies in both England and France, art schools today are subsidized by public funds and wealthy patrons. This is actually a great thing for students who have no archdukes to grease the gates of an academy. Open enrollment for at least the undergraduate art student is a particularly American way of thinking, where class, gender and income aren’t taken into much consideration at the start. If we could just keep it nice and simple like that.

Yet at the graduate level, the mindset is more cloistered and rarefied. Here future instructors who will influence generations are groomed in art, often amid an attached progressive philosophy that is entrenched but not immutable. Lenin forecast future victories in education with “give us the child for eight years, and it will be a Bolshevik forever.” Given that the average Ph.D. takes about 8 years with total immersion in many institutions, the commies are apparently serious and have their positions all staked out.

Some of the fiercest political battles in this nation rage in the academic world under the radar and untelevised, decade after decade. This isn’t how artists should be educated in a free nation, but it will be up to students, voters and donors to make it change.

Once artists were considered humble craftsmen who only had to worry about art and avoiding starvation, but the Renaissance changed all that. Painters such as Raphael and Michelangelo became huge, social phenomena, raising artists to the status of philosophers, poets and other valued intellectuals.

Whether the respect artists enjoyed over the last few centuries is actually helpful or just ensnaring us in endless political and social fratricide is a matter of debate. There seems to be no turning back, so why not rethink how we run the American ‘academy’? This time for artists, not ideologues.

George W. Bush’s Scottish terrier is charming the world through the former president’s paintings, something D.C.’s betting class would have never laid odds on even a year ago.

Bush didn’t chose to retire in a lethargic swoon to lick his wounds, but continues to challenge himself – this time by learning to paint in oils. Mindlessly doodling a year ago opened the door to all this creativity and attention – and who’d have thought?

With encouragement from friends and family and inspiration from Winston Churchill (via his book “Painting as a Pastime”) GWB decided to give art a chance. Describing to the Dallas Morning News his “great delight in busting stereotypes,” Bush added that he studies privately with an artist and paints almost daily.

What does he have to lose after being leader of the free world, the complexities of post-9/11 and almost universal excoriation in the press? Bush has the kind of thick cowboy hide a fledging artist can find useful when facing critics … or their own insecurities. His art was brought to public without his permission when a hacker sent three years worth of family photos and email to various Internet sites.

Some art writers have become unexpected bedfellows and cheerleaders of this new manifestation of George W Bush.

Jerry Saltz writing for New York Magazine shouts out, “OMG! Pigs Fly. George W. Bush Is a Good Painter!”

After an introductory bash on the man’s character, moral positions and basically all activity since birth, Saltz remarkably continues to rave about Bush’s paintings.

In what can be interpreted as either generous, heartfelt tribute or pure patronization, the critic defends GWB and boldly contradicts other art writers who labeled his debut works “awkward and simple” amongst less printable things.

In a series of somewhat contradictory statements, Saltz gushes, “They show someone doing the best he can with almost no natural gifts – except the desire to do this.”

He seems sincere, whatever the motivation.

Saltz waxes favorably over the fact that Bush paints in his weight room and wears a baseball cap, finding that original and perhaps manly. He compares one of his works to Grant’s “American Gothic,” mentioning “the purity of the lone American farmer. Individuality.”

GWB is quite humble in the face of sudden media civility, mentioning that his “signature is more valuable than the painting.” Incidentally Bush uses his presidential number “43″ alone as his signature.

Unfinished work by George W. Bush

Beyond the universally popular Miss Beazley (who could criticize a Scottish terrier?), Bush’s self portraiture has caused the greatest interest and fevered psychological speculation. Two unfinished paintings that were hacked off family emails feature isolated body parts and partial nudity, always an attention grabber.

Although amateur and still a little rough around the edges, these first attempts at artistic self -discovery are almost universally intriguing to viewers, including myself. Two are bathing scenes, implying possible issues of cleansing, sexuality or religious rites – or maybe it’s just a shower and Bush liked the tile patterns. One work shows only his feet and knees from a bather’s viewpoint in a tub.

Speaking to ABC’s Diane Sawyer, Bush relates his new challenges: “By the way, that’s not that easy to paint: Water hitting water you know, and the perspective.”

The literal transparency of his body here portraying unglamorous and generally hidden feet is a statement in itself. Just five years ago Bush was heavily guarded, commanding armies and making life-or-death decisions affecting the entire earth. It’s inconceivable to me that this man who was blamed by conspiracy theorists and disinformation specialists for causing 9/11 and lying to Congress would create such a humble and open image. I also can’t imagine the current president ever exposing himself in such a vulnerable, fragile or self-effacing manner; he truly has too much to hide.

Another bathing image is even more cryptic and the most intriguing of the lot. In a somewhat unnerving shower scene, Bush reveals his nude torso and a tiny glimpse of his face in a shaving mirror. The composition is Asian, asymmetric and leaves the viewer searching for more information, for what seems to be hidden. The painter doesn’t face us, but engages the world indirectly and obliquely.

Saltz waxes poetic over the grooming: “Both border on the visionary, the absurd, the perverse, the frat boy. Each echoes the same isolation in small space. Rumination without guilt. Thought without dark nights.”

He continues to describe and find meaning in the lighting, hunched posture and slightly averted gaze in the painting. Whether Bush painted these with any intentionality or just thought, “Hey, why don’t I paint myself in the shower?” only God and he knows.

This work triggered a storm swell of responses from critics, ranging from the filthy to the sublime. Here are a few responses to Jerry Saltz’ good review at vulture.com:

• “I do think they are well done. Surprisingly well done. … His paintings are disturbing. And art is the only place in the universe where that is a good thing whereas George W Bush is concerned. “
• “LMAO! The game and toys master loves his therapy!”
• “Here, a conservative ex-leader of the United States of America shows us his naked legs in the bath. It’s a strange and wonderful window into GW’s private life.”

Other than Saltz, most media professionals were unimpressed, but many unnecessarily nasty. Unable to control personal vitriol from skewing opinions, they delivered uniform, reactionary rants and diatribes.

Dan Amira turned an art critique into what should be a patented sermon of clichés for liberals by now: “Bush … staring off into the corner of the shower, as if contemplating past sins that can never be washed away, no matter how much soap you use and how hard you scrub.”

Someone, please send him a pulpit.

Oliver Burkeman displays a sudden, grave concern for correct perspective and realism: “Look at that impossible reflection in the shower mirror … or the perspective on the bathtub, which must be the longest and narrowest in existence.”

Unfinished work by George W. Bush

Burkeman primly feigns horror over “sending naked pictures of yourself to your sister,” so we can safely assume his siblings have never seen him in a swim trunk, which says more about Burkeman than anyone else.

Critics read in a thousand other subplots and vantages: Freudian psychology, family dynamics, religious symbolism, but always politics has the final word. This isn’t avoidable if the artist was first a president, but the degree that it utterly controls the evaluation of worth in art was in this case shocking even to me.

Oh, the trajectories of venom Bush sets off in some circles over mild-mannered images that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if they had been done by anyone else. Not honest criticism of technique or lack of it, but yet another reason to blame GWB for everything from the weather to AIDS. I’m fully expecting someone to make a case he is destroying art – perhaps Alec Baldwin, who really needs another reason to say stupid things now that Hugo Chavez is dead.

Viewers can’t help but temper visual art through a lens of our own bias and experience, and GWB’s won’t be an exception. Bush may keep up the prodigious output of paintings in the future and may well make some interesting stuff. But he will never have the opportunity to work in a neutral vacuum as other artists.

It’s unlikely love or hate via critics will move Bush one way or the other, as he only needs to please himself.

“I love to paint, painting has changed my life in an unbelievably positive way,” he said to Diane Sawyer recently.

GWB carries his legacy through the eyes of viewers who are also judging his presidency while they judge his work. This is going to make for some interesting commentary, as the political divide widens around Miss Beazley and the bathtubs.

Putting aside phantoms and bloody fingers for a moment, the Bard’s thoughts could easily apply to the entire realm of the arts. Creative people reveal, investigate, build or experiment with material objects and spiritual realities in highly unusual ways. Many are deemed quite demented until a new medium or genre takes off and becomes socially acceptable. Sharing their discoveries with the world in new or meaningful forms often assumes the form of some type of “art” in all its diversity.

Artists and art lovers have this in common; they actively search out the potential of objects, materials, situations or places rather than accepting them at the flat face value the world assigns them. Think about Warhol with his soup cans, Rachel Whiteread and her cast of a life-size Victorian home or musical footpads and laser instruments.

But artists are only part of this picture, let’s say the foreground. Without a scattering of supporters, most art isn’t budging more than a few feet from a studio. Collectors and promoters willing to consider “things in heaven and earth” imbibe the artist’s vision if it moves them personally. Some are renowned for the great names they nurtured – Gertrude Stein and Alfred Stieglit,z as well as contemporary mega collectors Eli Broad or the Ahmansons.

Others dwell in relative obscurity, promoting art for the sheer joy of it and sharing with their private audiences. Dr Cecilia Cárdenas’ dental office in Guadalajara is one of those secret corners of the earth holding a surprise for her guests – in this case a “heart transplant.” Contemporary art with Christian themes cover the walls and floor space in her waiting room. Quality of the work is very high and relatively large-scale, almost overwhelming the small, tiled area.

This is a deliberate move by Cardenas, a serious Christian who loves art and God, thinking one may as well lead to consideration of the other. The current pieces she commissioned were based on Bible passages on the heart. In this occasion, art unites with words to reinforce that the main purpose is not just about knowing the Bible, but about experiencing it.

Working with three artists from the collective Sector Reforma – Alejandro Fournier, Santino Escatel and Javier Cárdenas Tavizon – they chose a verse to interpret and were otherwise allowed free reign in design, expression and choice of mediums. The results are particularly impressive considering that the collective is not in the least bit religious.

Cardenas struggled at first with “legalism,” thinking that God could “only use Christian artists” to interpret His Word. But the very fact that they accepted her proposal confirmed her hopes – that the exhibit will bring many to “have a personal encounter with Him.”

Her introduction in Spanish and English echoes the chosen verses, and she quotes Hebrews 4:12 as motivation: “For the word of God is living and powerful … and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”

“Heart Transplant” opened in a public space in Guadalajara, and after a short tour in churches, landed in her offices. A flyer by graphic artist April Hageman 2,000 miles away in Iowa describes the project as “materializing spiritual revelations from the Bible, concerning the human heart.”

Hageman also remarks on how the exhibition affects not only viewers, but also those involved in the production, even from a distance: “This experience opened my eyes to the power and reach that God has in our lives.”

Visitors first notice the sound of running water and its unusual source – from an aorta. A larger than life heart pulses jets of water from vinyl ventricles with a basin of mirrored water beneath.

Alejandro Fournier’s interpretation of Proverbs 27:19 in the form of a fountain is medically, anatomically correct and almost a concrete materialization of the words of the verse: “As water reflects a face, so a man’s heart reflects the man.”

Left: "Reflection on Proverbs 27:19" Right: "Western Union," by Alejandro Fournier

Fournier enjoyed watching people interact with his piece as they stopped and contemplated his construction – a metaphor for the human heart. Viewers stopped to meditate on the origin of idea, becoming for the moment part of a “Heart Transplant.”

His work includes observing obsolete technologies in his almost anthropological “Western Union” video, where he interviewed and filmed German Mennonites in Mexico and their ongoing ideological battle between modern technology, faith and nature. Fournier has a great installation from that, with a skeletal, reduced and purposeless “John Deere” tractor among other interesting things.

Santino Escatel presents a very large photographic C-print representing Proverbs 3:3: “Let not mercy and truth forsake thee; bind them about thy neck, write them upon the tablet of thine heart.”

A dark, heavily shaded corner of a room with little contrast, the image is minimal and requires study. In the darkest corner a small square of golden light appears, the only warmth and focal point.

Left: "From Proverbs 3:3-4" Right: "Patio de los Arrayanes," by Santino Escatel

Escatel works in varied media such as video and installation. His work “Patio de los Arrayanes” features a whimsical grouping of metallic, hinged and winged structures that shade and fan visitors while gasping like prehistoric, mechanical birds migrated from Silicon Valley.

Artist and collective member Javier Cárdenas Tavizon offered another medically accurate rendering of a human heart, which can be tempered and changed by viewers with a movable and lined Plexiglas screen. He created the image, then scanned and reproduced his “scanimation.” His print assumes at least three different positions and color casts, paralleling dark (stony hearts), light (hearts of flesh) and purification.

Left: "Amphibian" – Right: "Heart Scanimation," by Javier Tavison

Tavizon enjoyed the challenge issued Cardenas’ commission, which included having to read and meditate deeply on a Biblical passage, possibly for the first time. His piece represents Ezekiel 11:19-20 and an affirmation of 1 John 1:7.

Other works include installations and sculptural intervention on all scales, as well as paintings. His oil on canvas “Amphibian” is noted as an “escape vehicle” and appears to be a memorial to a horrific tsunami. Tavizon’s style is something like simplified silk-screen and Japanese ukiyo-e (block print) – particularly in this piece.

Cardenas is thrilled about the process and work done with Sector Reforma. Although she hasn’t seen the milling crowds she hoped for at some events, this echoes her private journey “to appreciate more my relationship with Him, than having my expectations fulfilled.”

Not every dentist, doctor or accounting office embarks on lofty expeditions of promoting art and evangelizing with the limited space and funds they have on hand; but it makes me realize we can all do more than we probably think.

“I dwell in possibility,” said Emily Dickenson, and those who would make and promote the arts must live there too.

In 1960 Japanese writer Seichō Matsumoto’s “Nami no Tō “or “Tower of Waves” was published to critical acclaim. It features a couple in a doomed relationship with the heroine dramatically ending her life in the Aokigahara Forest. Since then suicides, particularly of the young, have explosively increased in Japan – 32,845 in 2009. There is of course no way to definitively fix blame on a particular book, but a few damning clues float to the surface.

Aokigahara Forest (or the Sea of Trees) sitting at the base of Mt Fuji has traditionally been a place to dread and avoid. Crammed with dense, dark trees that muffle sound and light and dotted with gaping ice caves, there is almost no wildlife. An eerie silence lends credence to tales of demons, ghosts and angry revenge spirits in what is also known as the “Demon Forest.” Convoluted trails lead to nowhere, and veins of subterranean iron render magnets and cell phones difficult to use, should the death pilgrim have a last-minute change of heart.

Popular mystery writer Matsumotoa probably had no intention of luring teens to their death when he penned his prose. However its power to inspire suicide is mutely confirmed by copies of “Nami no Tō” lying beside many dead. The work glorifies and romanticizes death as a means to a peaceful end of earthly problems.

Fulbright scholar Roxanne Russell notes the strong association between beauty, death and romance in the work. Even the dark forest is idealized, peaceful, full of birds and rabbits – hardly the sense most Japanese have of the place, post-novel.

Another work “The Complete Manual of Suicide” by Wataru Tsurumi, is often its companion piece. Tsurumi actively promotes suicide and its methods, such as his helpful advice that Jukai (the sea of trees) is “the perfect place to die.” Authorities find about 100 bodies each year with others probably hidden. Annually police and volunteers comb the forest looking for bodies, which they often find draped from trees. In a sinister twist the Yakuza (Japanese mafia) pay beggars to find and strip corpses of valuables. Apparently America isn’t the only nation plagued by Kervorkians.

Japanese kill themselves at the rate of more than 30,000 a year by hangings, gassings, poison, leaping into oncoming trains and other methods. This didn’t begin with the suicide manual, but is an ancient theme in Japan, often an acceptable way to avoid disgrace, debt or even a means of apology. Authorities are very concerned about the needless loss of life, though, and with a plummeting birth rate, they have none to lose.

Western literature hosted several of its own suicide seasons as well, Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, Madame Butterfly, et al. The 18th century went into overdrive on the demise of sad heroes such as Thomas Chatterton, a young poet who tragically died of self-administered arsenic poisoning at 17. Artists idealized his innocence, youth and tragically wasted genius for most of the next century. Chatterton is almost beatified in paintings, poems, eulogies and ballads by Keats, Shelley and the lot.

Painter Henry Wallis prettified Chatterton’s suicide up so well that prints of his painting “The Death of Chatterton” occupied homes across Britain. Wallis’ image leaves the young man illuminated, elegant and graceful in a tragically Greek kind of way. There is no blood, bloated body or mourning family; but a proper, socially acceptable suicide with attendant pathos and glory.

"The Death of Chatterton" by Wallis

After Chatterton’s demise, Goethe’s 1774 novel “The Sufferings of Young Werther” added to the repertoire of the suicidally inclined. The young protagonist Werther kills himself in anguish and obsession over a woman he couldn’t have. Goethe’s first and sole novel in the “sturm und drang” genre launched him to stardom, and he later regretted the melodramatic, besotted young monster he created.

Goethe couldn’t put “Werther” back in the bottle, though. The book was a mega-hit spawning entire industries of parodies, figurines, clothing, fans, cologne and operas. German youth identified with the fictional character so tightly that some immersed themselves body and soul. They read it compulsively and memorized it, made processions to the supposed “tomb” of Werther and created a unique sub-culture.

“Werther-fieber” (Werther Fever), which afflicted crazed fans, may sound familiar to us now (think Justin, “Twilight” and Harry Potter). Unfortunately some kids carried their emulation all the way to the novel’s dark, despairing end, which included a costumed copycat suicide. Local authorities actually banned the book in Leipzig in an effort to protect youth from their extreme preoccupation.

Now we lay buried under an avalanche of film, novels and music either expressly dedicated to suicide or using it for a crutch, a means to make all problems disappear.

I have a problem with this, as did Friedrich Nicolai, a peer from Goethe’s time. He created a satire, a lighter version of Werther’s “sorrows.” Nicolai’s happy ending involved a gun that had been wisely loaded with chicken blood instead of bullets and his love returned. All was well and happily resolved with a little plot tweak.

Too bad it doesn’t work that way in real life. I don’t propose we outlaw depiction of suicide, but artists may want to consider the effects their work have on readers/viewers; particularly if the target audience is teens who are easily manipulated by their random, orbiting emotions – zenith Monday, nadir Tuesday.

Instead the young and easily despondent are afflicted on all sensual fronts, often by the arts. Ozzy croons, “Where to hide, suicide is the only way out.” Silverchair’s “Suicidal Dreams” is very popular: “The rope is here, now I’ll find a use. I’ll kill myself, I’ll put my head in a noose.” Third-class poetry, and it’s available for your child’s ringtone too. What more could anyone ask?

Films and books may not as obviously promote the final solution to 12-year-olds but if they can get their hands on videos, “The Virgin Suicides” from 1999 portrays an absolute fascination with the suicides of five young sisters. That’s all.

A prototype for films made expressly to demoralize and mess up kids on all fronts is the 2011 “Suicide Room.” A young protagonist wrestles the mud of teen angst, mental illness and gender confusion, ending his wretched life by overdose in a bar bathroom. Suicidal schemes and existentialist chat rooms are heavily featured throughout.

If the Supreme Court judged films like “Suicide Room” by the same standards it sets to define pornography (Miller Test), it would fail on several points. For instance, this work “taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political and scientific value.” Hopefully it also was never inspiring.

Let’s pass by books for now, because apparently most kids have – unless they’re made into videos. Directors, artists, writers and singers help shape the world of young people, who are highly suggestible to a combination of emotion and art, as Goethe found long ago. This applies to music videos and other types of digital art presentations as well.

Whether we accept it or not, we all bear some responsibility for the greater good. It’s hard to believe any artist seriously wants their young viewers to take a dive, overdose on heroin or die in flaming glory. Then who would buy their stuff?

Azusa Hayano is a ranger/geologist and suicide counselor of sorts who walks the “Sea of Trees” tending Aokigahara forest. He shows compassion and patience for the few living beings he encounters, encouraging them to enjoy and value their lives. For those who made their last decision, he attempts to identify remains and arrange a dignified burial.

Artists with all our gifts should be able to do as much this humble park ranger to inspire life and discourage death.

“Nobody is alone in this world,” says Hayano. “I think it is impossible to die heroically by committing suicide.”

When T.S. Eliot was the darling of Anglo-American literary set, his readers shared the common sorrows of the Great Depression and two devastating World Wars. Possibly they had even heard of the scandalous treatment of his “mad” wife Vivienne – left to rot in an asylum while he sought inspiration elsewhere.

In spite of his personal failings, Eliot’s later poetic struggles with faith and God won him a Nobel prize and millions of loyal fans since his 1965 death. The “Four Quartets,” one of his most admired and openly spiritual writings, was attacked by critics like George Orwell for its “Christian orthodoxy.”

In 2010 a group artists and writers kibitzing at a New York dinner discovered they shared a common muse and passion. They admired Eliot’s “Four Quartets” to the point of memorizing portions of the great work – no small feat, because the piece is famous for its complexity, considered almost impenetrable in places.

Two of the visual artists, Makoto Fujimura and Bruce Herman were so enthused they birthed an ambitious vision: to loosely transcribe and respond to Eliot’s work with a series of new art works.

Both created four large paintings as a response to the “imagery, emotion and allusion evoked by ‘Four Quartets.’” Joining their spiritual enterprise is composer Christopher Theofanidis from Yale and theologian Jeremy Begbie from Duke University.

The newly commissioned works populate “QU4RTETS,” a touring international exhibition that celebrates the latent possibility and power of art and Chrsitianity – also the inaugural project of the Fujimura Institute.

Fujimura uses the term “generative” to explain how great works of art bear a type of creative offspring. For instance, both artists ultimately used dimensions of the Golden Mean in their work, totally unknown to the other. This proves an objective substance and meaning they uncovered in Eliot’s poem, while working independently and in vastly different styles.

Eliot considered “Four Quartets” (1943) his masterpiece, a sentiment apparently shared by the Noble Prize Committee. The Quartets describe a journey for meaning and hope of salvation from the destruction in the world, while referencing religious literature such as Dante and Julian of Norwich. In “East Coker” (one of the Quartets) Eliot clearly announces the Apocalypse.

Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

Makoto Fujimura with his work

Both Fijimura and Herman experienced personal disasters and related to Eliot’s cry for salvation in their own lives. Fujimura and his family lived 9/11 close-up, with a studio in the TriBeCa district of New York City. Fleeing chaos and living as temporary exiles was a physical and psychological dislocation. Fujimura describes needing a “landing place for my imagination,” a temporary home and found solace in the “Four Quartets.”

His paintings are wonderfully abstract, which seem the perfect vehicle to “illustrate” poetry, the most abstract of all literature. Fujimura freely uses gold leaf, implicit of deity and glory and attempts to convey content from each Quartet. Eliot used the term “objective correlative,” a device used even in abstraction to signify emotion in art.

“QU4RTET III” is partially covered by a grid, no movement, as an echo of the poem’s phrase “The Still Point” repeated in several dimensions and works. Some of these pieces are quite emptied in the foreground, one almost entirely black, forcing viewers to look for depth, layers and details in the background.

“They are phenomenological, they require our senses to be quiet and still,” Fujimura explains.

He describes his work here as dependent on pulverized pigment working through the darkness and “foreboding colors beyond the veil,” a theme of Eliot’s: “Being generative means to ‘practice resurrection’ in all areas of our lives, to become a refractive artwork of God.”

During the exhibit Theofanidis’ composition and Eliot’s poem may be performed, creating a multi-media contextual space.

Fujimura is admired as a thinker and writer on issues of art, creating and faith, and he speaks in depth at some of the exhibits on the broader vision of Eliot and “QU4RTETS.”

"Quartets No. 1 (Spring)," by Bruce Herman

Bruce Herman’s preparation for the project stretches over the four decades he has pondered and appreciated the work of T.S. Eliot. Eliot believed it was necessary to first understand tradition before you could create anything authentically new, something that guided Herman through the “massive cultural upheaval” of the 1960s.

His pieces are a parallel form to the “Four Quartets,” not a direct illustration. Herman steeped in the “beautiful language and imagery” before attempting a visual equivalent and response to the same realities that moved the poet.

Using a synthesis of traditional figure painting and modern abstraction, Herman’s pieces are based on fours: stages of life, seasons of the year and four elements; earth, air, fire and water. The theme of time and God’s work of redemption through time is repeated in Eliot’s work.

Herman refers to “Burnt Norton” in his painting “QU4RTET No. 2″ with a child squatting in a tree: “For the leaves were full of children/Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.”

Herman employs gold and silver also as a “temporal narrative both inside and outside” by giving the viewer a chance to complete the work with his reflection. Light shifts, bends and changes invoking the “liquid, spiritual light in which we live and move and have our being” or the presence of God.

Christopher Theofanidis, one of the most prolific and admired American composers, produced a brilliant score that reflects Eliot’s poem and supports the work of Herman and Fujimura.

“At the Still Point,” a string and piano quintet, connotes the place of accepting and waiting for God, a place outside of time. Theofanidis is currently working on two operas for the San Francisco and Houston opera companies and is on the faculty of the Yale music school. “At the Still Point ” was performed at Duke, Yale, Carnegie Hall, Baylor and other locations.

The artists in “QU4RTET” are collaborating with each other and with Eliot’s creation in a dialogue about the value of literature and Christian tradition, although the work is quite modern. Their success affirms that excellence in art has value beyond mere entertainment; it holds power to inspire and recreate itself, a type of “life.” This is especially important in an age that disregards or is even hostile to the Christian message and is a direct rebuttal to it. Will sitcoms or Lady Gaga’s performances move viewers a century from now? Possibly, but I highly doubt it.

Makoto Fujimura is an internationally know artist, writer and speaker and founder of the International Arts Movement.

Bruce Herman is Lothlorien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts of Gordon College

“QU4RTET” scheduled performances:

April 13-May 1, 2013: Barrington Center for the Arts, Gordon College, Wenham, Mass.

May 8-Sept. 21: Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.

Oct. 5, 6: IAM New York City conference – venue to be announced

Oct. 24–November 2013: Westmont Art Museum, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, Calif.

Projected for 2014-15: Tokyo, Hong Kong University and Cambridge University

“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

– John F. Kennedy, Yale University graduating class speech (June 11, 1962)

On May 1, 1958, a group of 32 Marxist sympathizers met in a Chicago hotel, planning the future disintegration of the American States. Organized by Soviet operatives, they were artists, writers, Hollywood producers, social theorists, professors, politicians and miscellaneous, hardcore Marxists.

Somehow they managed to evade the keen eye of CIA counterintelligence head James Angleton, who had been tracking members of the operation relentlessly, revealing moles and snagging spy networks like a spider in his web. He warned of Soviet disinformation and deception campaigns, which he believed reached into the U.S. government even then – but this one, far under the radar, went undetected.

Hours and many arguments later their plans ran aground as they concluded the U.S. military was too strong for any direct assault and the nation’s mindset was decidedly anti-communist. This would all have to change.

Hashing out a long-range plan decade by decade, they hoped to change public perception, weaken American resolve and install their man in the White House within 30 years. It took 50.

Only an elite core understood the scope of the plan in its entirety, and later operatives were approached considering their personality, weaknesses and pride. Justice issues were peddled to attract philosophers and future politicians, while intellectuals and universities were plied with flattery, attention and serious money. Artists, actors and public relations specialists played starring role years later in a plot so spectacularly unlikely that it wouldn’t pass as believable in a John le Carre novel.

Decade after decade the goals hammered out that night by the committee were eventually met:

• By the 1960s, much of Hollywood and leftist intellectuals function as Marxist shills
• Marxist criticism and analysis is required for many higher degrees.
• Church, traditional morality and loyalty is ridiculed in popular culture
• Americans are utterly dependant on popular culture, which is saturated by leftists.
• Marxists fill posts in media, colleges, courts, politics – even the church
• Constant bombardment of U.S. unilateral disarmament and capitulation to United Nations demands

But the big prize kept ripening on the stem just out of reach for decades, an open, unapologetic communist in the White House. This required intense planning and a virtual convergence of factors in their favor: willing accomplices in media and Congress, voters equally ignorant of history and the Constitution and a flexible, change agent of their own creation.

9/11 opened the gates of destabilization and national soul-searching while several guerilla-Marxist art collectives saw their chance and rushed in. Quebec-based Deoconiste led the charge aided by the disarmingly named MASS-x, Angry Fishwives, Voxb#x and TuT-tUt.

Deoconiste’s members were fiercely Marxists first, artists peripherally (neo-Dada-Marxist, anarchists) and the type Angleton worried he would somehow miss. They considered their art to consist of political intervention and toyed with the idea of placing an massive, avant-garde art installation in the White House. Propaganda specialists from the USSR and Eastern Europe had migrated over to give them a hand, and some of their original members had attended the 1958 meeting and kept the vision alive. Expat Soviet experts on miscommunication and deception theory joined the team, infiltrating the generally unsuspecting national media in North America.

Voxb#x specialized in sloganeering and the science of visual and verbal meme campaigns, prepared for a long campaign. In 1972 they began to secretly approach far-left members of Democratic Party, which had been infiltrated and softened for the coup over four decades.

While Marxist clubs and instructors had flourished on U.S. campuses since the 1920s, “AngryFishWives” and spinoff groups were sent to organize the ranks while headhunting for new talent and student volunteers. The name refers to hoards of angry fishwives who threatened Marie Antoinette before the French Revolution. The (neo) “wives” worked with community organizers with similar missions, such as ACORN.

TuT-tUt is far weirder than the name. They combined results of social science experiments such as mass delusion and crowd control in staged events involving music, drama, drugs and multi-media. Marxists game-theoretic models were worked into social science experiments on undermining or building trust. Ironically, TuT-tUt used information commissioned by military intelligence and the CIA to do this.

Originally formed by students and staff at UCLA Film School, MASS-x’s Marxist ideology trickled into Hollywood through the years like a diseased blood transfusion. Later the industry indirectly supported the group’s goals through economic cronyism from leftist gentry, huge grants and unearned promotions.

From virtual reality to the Real Deal

The progeny of MASS-x, newly pumped with cultural victories over conservative America, wanted more control over the White House and D.C. Secret planning sessions after 9/11 between most media outlets, leftist politicians, wealthy donors and unknown hosts led to a declaration of virtual war and a plan; fashion our man from scratch for the presidency.

Needing a blank canvas on which to cast their collective vision, they searched for a human Tabula Rosa, and many fingers pointed to Barrack Obama.

He was young and photogenic, a necessity for the massively visual Hollywood, blockbuster-style public relations campaign they planned. Neither black nor white, Obama could play the race card both ways and read a speech well.

The best part of Obama was his formlessness, the votes he never bothered to cast as an Illinois senator, the missing Selective Service and other records and the multiple personalities and pseudonyms he amassed by a young age.

Promoted through college by wealthy Saudi benefactors and the relentless, Chicago political machine, his tutors and benefactors Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn recognized Obama’s potential to spread Marxist power even then. You could do anything with a man like that.

The 2008 presidential campaign was a giant, ongoing, social experiment on America’s citizens. Could their perception and emotions be controlled using new media, mindless slogans and repetition? Would mass public disapproval and primitive psychological punishment, shame relatively conservative citizens into electing an unknown man primarily because of his color?

Hyped through Internet experts in social trust and deception, Obama’s empty phrases and patchy background were crafted into a solidly real man. The mass of citizens were tired of war and trouble and searching for a savior. Open ended “hope” and undefined “change” were filled in by individual minds who set aside rational thought and went with along with the highly entertaining program of the first design president.

My big, fat disclaimer:

The assertions I make here are largely factual, but not all the details are. Consider it fictionalized history. Guerilla art collectives, some persons, dates and meetings are speculated details, while major action and background of the recent elections are historic fact.

Why create fictionalized scripts concerning Obama’s past when there is already so much damning evidence of his split loyalties? Won’t this just be assigned to the scrap pile of conspiracy theories already clogging the blogosphere? Yes, and that’s the point.

The very blankness of the man, his interchangeable histories, religions, names and identities, work against anyone who accuses him. It’s all a “conspiracy theory,” and who could prove otherwise? A thinking person of integrity and curiosity will attempt to fill in the gaping blanks and connect the dots, coming up with any number of speculations, which can all easily be denied.

Mindless masses aren’t the Obama administrations’ concern. The people who projected all their hopes for a better future on one human being have proved they are weak and easily manipulated by media hype and propaganda.

You really can fool most of the people most of the time. A bitter pill to the pride of those that elected the man, most aren’t willing to admit it even if they are beginning to see the light.

The success of open, unconcealed, betrayal and deceit was noted by Nazi death-camp torturer and doctor Josef Mengele, who marveled at how his victims denied their terrible reality: “The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe it.”

These are possibly the most irritating questions artists encounter from viewers, especially if they work with some type of abstraction.

Humans tend to classify what they see – it’s part of our visual system. When that is denied in modern art, viewers may feel slightly threatened by the ambiguity, as if they are being toyed with – although it’s almost never an artist’s intent.

Abstractionists have as varied and personal reasons for their work as any other genre of artists. Early statements on abstraction focused on a rejection of the explicity of objects and the mental limitations they form in our minds. The artist himself (almost all early abstractionists were male) became more important and recognizable than the subject matter had been. Art delineated by its barest elements such as movement, style, color and raw emotion laid its foundations; and myth, psychology and even spiritual faith informed it.

Politics and propaganda were entirely rejected by early abstract artists – an aversion to New Deal artists celebrating America and Soviet Realists in the other ring. Reacting to art used in waging and rationalizing war, they avoided all overt images and narratives – even human rights issues in modern art. The suffering and scale of destruction in the great wars couldn’t be served by a single image, but poetic and personal allusions or symbols may be more powerful: Max Ernst and his crumbling, repeated, dark edifices; Robert Motherwell’s ghostly elegies to the Spanish Civil War; or Gottlieb’s constant inference to the Holocaust and Hiroshima by use of simple shapes.

But an amusing thing happened to abstract art on the way to detachment; it was either co-opted or violently rejected by widely divergent ends of the political spectrum.

The secretive, personal and hidden nature of abstract art infuriated the Soviets and other totalitarian leaders. They found it useless to their goals and to the “state” made in their image. Hitler denounced abstraction as one of several types of officially “degenerate” art, banning it on pain of death on the pretext that it was birthed by “Jews.” Both dictators could clearly read the anti-war and universal concepts underlying abstractionism at the time and didn’t appreciate it.

Ironically, the political persuasion of most artists then (as now) leaned far to the left. So far that after Stalin and Hitler buddied up to crush the world, a group of saner artists publicly rejected communism by leaving the American Artists’ Congress in 1939. This “de rigueur” association for New York artists at the time was an open front for the Communist Party USA, reeling in members by claiming to fight fascism for them. After showing their true colors by openly endorsing the Soviet invasion of Poland and blaming the whole thing on England and France, an exodus of artists “not hostile to cultural freedom” began.

In spite of abstract artists’ efforts to stay unspotted by politics, it dogged them endlessly. Communists at home and abroad attacked the non-complying American artists, labeling them “fake prophets of skepticism, anguish and despair” in opposition to the “joy and affirmation” in socialist realism or Marxist muralists such as Rivera.

Example of Soviet socialist realism

And here’ where it gets interesting. After World War II the newly developed Central Intelligence Agency developed a sudden fascination with the arts. Although whispers floated for decades, revelation and records released in the 1990s prove promotion and patronage of the CIA, especially in behalf of America’s abstract expressionist painters such Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Frances Stoner Saunder’s 1995 interview with former CIA employees confirmed that in an effort to promote and prove western cultural superiority and to lure artists away from Marxism, they extensively supported abstract expressionism and other American art forms.

Why? Maybe just to irritate the communists. The immense success of Pollock, etc., was a slap in the face and deliberate dig at the commies and their supporters in the arts. The style embodied virtually everything the Soviets and Chinese despised; it celebrated personality, individualism, freedom of expression, rebellion and was on the face non-political and uncontrolled. In comparison, Soviet art seemed stodgy, melodramatic and histrionic with its earnest, repeated appeals.

For much the same reasons the CIA supported and helped fund the export of Jazz, Hollywood movies, travel agencies and touring cultural programs such as a subsidizing an animated version of Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

All of this was deeply behind the curtains, however, as the artists, their agents and other beneficiaries had no idea that at least part of their spectacular early successes were thanks to the folks at the CIA.

Joseph McCarthy wasn’t included in the work, as he denounced all avant-garde work as trash, and President Truman was a problem for them also. When a touring exhibit entitled “Advancing American Art” made its debut in 1947, Truman was not amused and famously remarked, “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” The show was quickly cancelled, but the CIA found more support with Eisenhower in 1953.

Eisenhower understood that culture deeply affects a generation and took the arts seriously. Belittling oppressive regimes for their treatment of artists as “slaves and tools of the state,” he crafted a careful doctrine of culture.

“Our aim is more subtle, more pervasive, more complete,” Eisenhower said. “We are trying to get the world by peaceful means to believe the truth. That truth is that Americans want a world at peace, a world in which peoples shall have opportunity for maximum individual development.”

If the interference of the CIA in the art market was unknown, then Nelson Rockefeller’s open admiration and massive patronage for the genre wasn’t. He is globally quoted as claiming abstract expressionism is a form of “free enterprise painting,” although I can’t find the original source.

"Autumn Rhythm," Jackson Pollock (1950)

Rockefeller purchased at least 2,500 works of abstract expressionists in the 1950s-60s, splashing them across the public landscape, which authors such as Annabell Shark assigned to purely political motives. She and other art historians (or possibly revisionists) attribute the personal and critical success of abstract expressionist like Jackson Pollack entirely to the machinations of Rockefeller and other Cold War power players. Shark also infers that Rockefeller considered only political motives behind his art purchases and promotion, using the Metropolitan Museum of Art, banks and many public buildings for that purpose.

Once again abstract artists are the target of politically inclined viewers and critics.

I find Shark’s claims hard to believe, however, as no one, not even fabulously wealthy art lovers and patriotic patrons, spend millions and gush over art they absolutely detest. Rockefeller used the qualities he found in abstract art to laud the “expression of human aspiration, thoughts and emotions in search of freedom and order.”

Another force to be reckoned with was Henry Luce, a powerful media mogul owning publications Life, Time, Fortune and others. Jackson Pollack was his special protégé and promoted on the pages of Life, a magazine generally not devoted to art. This raised suspicion that it was a deliberate move on the part of Luce, who sought to mark the post-war world as “The American Century,” and they accuse him of using artists in this effort.

The CIA also quietly supported the publication from 1953-1990 of the Encounter, a literary magazine of such merit and range of contributors that few have the nerve to openly attack the agency’s choice of literature to this day. Even the founder, poet Stephen Spender, had no inkling of the CIA/MI6 monetary underwriting and was never approached by them or constrained in any way, he claims. Contributors are a who’s who of political, economic and literary writers. They run from John Kenneth Galbraith, Marshall MacLuhan, Seamus Heaney, Erica Jong and Clive James to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Could we agree even the CIA can do some things right? This may even be a worthwhile use of public taxes – even if the majority of Americans at the times detested abstract expressionism and only a small minority would ever read the journal Encounter.

Centuries before Sun Tzu plotted for various emperors, the Greeks dished up a grand gift for the Trojans using a little deception of their own. Since then, the world’s armies have become sleekly sophisticated, enlisting scientists, engineers, naturalists and artists to deceive the enemy and protect their soldiers.

I must say, though, the mysterious materialization of a gargantuan wooden horse, dependent only on the curiosity of your enemy – can anyone really beat that?

Back to the 21st century and enter the Pentagon, where military brass and brains are designing the wardrobe of the U.S. soldier among other tasks. The restyle is urgently needed because their last camouflage pattern proved disastrous. The Universal Camouflage Pattern or UCP, sounds as dull as it looks.

But that’s by far the least serious issue. The 2004 pixilated design cost $5 billion and left soldiers feeling they were walking targets, offering little to no protection in any environment.

Eric German in The Daily quotes an Army specialist as he describes enduring the dismal UCP in Iraq: “The only time I have ever seen it work well was in a gravel pit.”

Discarded UCP pattern and some contenders

Garbing the Army with useless and expensive gear is almost a case study on the failures of bureaucracy, and the most recent “improvement,” Multi-cam, isn’t making the grade either. While the Army argued politics with specialists and counter-specialists over the years, the Marines showed us how it’s done.

The story goes that their 2002 MARPAT uniform (digital camo, styled after Canada’s) was quickly vetted after a little input from Marine snipers at Quantico, Va.

But there’s more – they helped choose a base color at a local Home Depot store by using paint samples – “Coyote Brown,” to be exact. The Marines’ famed “flexibility of execution” and open methods came in handy here.

If MARPAT is working so well for the Marines, why not use it for the entire Army? Apparently the Marines aren’t having it, as the few and proud won’t share their signature uniforms with just anyone.

Military couturiers employ mostly digital artists at this point, but that wasn’t always the case. Modern camouflage as a distinct, visual and scientific field began with painter and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer. His major 1909 books on protective coloration, mimicry and concealment in animals influenced military camouflage in World War I as well as other American artists.

The French, originators of “trompe de l’oiel” (or tricking the eyes) were first to employ military camouflage in 1915. Roy R. Behrens relates how they made painter Lucien Victor Guirand de Scevola commanding office of the fledging art designed to protect planes during airborne strikes. Groups of “camoufleurs” had previously been sculptors, painters, architects, illustrators and stage designers in civilian life.

"Dazzling" HMS Kildangan (1918)

Painter George de Forest Brush magically caused airplanes to “disappear” while Thayer worked out techniques in disruptive, high-contrast camouflage. Using his theories, British artist Norman Wilkinson morphed Allied ships into startling apparitions that confused German U-boat gunners planning to sink them.

Unable to hide the floating behemoths, they choose to “dazzle” instead. Early camouflage art was heavily influenced by Cubism with its exploded vision. Resembling a deranged circus in black and white, the unresolved angles and heavily distorted perspective made it difficult to tell aft from anchor. Before the age of radar, this was enough to leave the enemy grasping for the speed and direction of a ship that appeared to change shape before his eyes. Allied ships had been sitting ducks for submarines, but records show less than 1 percent of U.S. merchant ships were lost after being tricked out to “dazzle.”

Europe’s artists were so taken by the new science that it influenced terminology and led to a “camouflage aesthetic” between the World Wars. While Picasso and Braque inspired transformation of Allied ships, contemporary Surrealists crafted theories based on disguise, deception and surprise.

Salavador Dali and Max Ernst were particularly struck by Thayer’s research and used it inventively in their art. Cellular metamorphosis, figure-ground reversal and confusion between animate and inanimate objects were all likely cousins of the camouflage movement. Dali actively supported the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil war with a visual rhetoric that helped by “controlling the enemy’s vision and paralyzing it.” Because many artists personally served in World War I, their later work was a personal and graphic response to it.

America’s camouflaged uniforms began with a rush order by General MacArthur in 1942. Designed by a horticulturalist and garden editor for Sunset magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle of all things, the patterns on these 150,000 jungle prototypes were dubbed “frogskins.”

Since then, U.S. military camouflage has met with varying degrees of success and disaster with the most recent designs listing toward appalling. After billions of dollars and a decade of work, we know the Army must be serious about this. But is there an inverse relation between the massive design campaign with hordes of experts and actual results?

As it stands, the next generation U.S. camo is still in development and research. Contending designs must consider varied terrains and light, scale and shadow and appear to break up outlines of a soldier’s body and depth. It should work equally well from all distances. That’s a lot to ask a lowly pair of fatigues and underlies the difficulty in creating the perfect camouflage.

Optical and perception studies are getting more sophisticated by the minute, and the Pentagon pays plenty of attention to science. Because they’ve had less than stellar results with the digital patterns, one possibility is to just make soldiers disappear at will, which would solve almost everything.

Technology for the “Harry Potter cloak” is already here with the advent of a cloth imbued with almost supernatural powers. British Columbia company Hyperstealth Biotechnology claims to have created an “invisibility cloak” using effects of light bending to completely fool the human eye. If that wasn’t enough, the material also removes thermal signatures, helping to block infrared detection according to Hyperstealth statements. Other than Superman, who can compete with this?

Our soldiers will be thrilled to have something practical and safe on their backs while in combat. But not all warfare occurs in jungles, deserts or open terrain. Because modern terrorist attacks have increased in heavily populated areas, allow me to offer an artist’s rendition of specialized, urban camouflage for consideration:

"Urban camouflage" for Tokyo

"Urban camouflage" for Seattle

If the Star Wars technology works in the field, traditional camouflage may soon be tossed out with other historical relics. But because of the huge influence that camo has on civilian fashion and culture, it will probably always be around in one form or another.