The Loveshade Family Blog

Who cares about privacy? Don't you trust your government to spy on you for your protection? Don't we have perfect leaders and police who are there for our benefit? Who doesn't completely trust our politicians and police? You'd damn well better trust them!

Art should be free to everybody! Our taxes should pay artist's living expenses just like they do school teachers, postal workers and politicians. That way artists can be free to do their art!

Very good, Matt, but, curiously, there's this very obscure and minor document called the United States Constitution and it supposedly protects us from the government.
Interestingly, though, it doesn't do squat to protect us from anyone else.

Matt yes I trust the government to spy on everything I do! It's gotten where if you go to the bathroom the government wants to know when, where and how much!

I release my art to the public domain. But I couldn't do that if I was trying to make a living!

I like what Gina said. Artists should be free to do their art! And the government shouldn't be free to spy on everybody for no good reason.

That's why we never had a toilet in our bathroom, Paul!

Hey, sorry I'm late, but I was heavily sidetracked with landlord problems ("Get this unit clean in 30 days or get out !" Or some such.) Got it mostly done by Thursday and by Friday all I wanted to do was veg in front of the TV.

Because of that, what was going to be brief has gotten long.
I know you guys don't like that, but I was away and stuff builds up.
Please forgive me, but I really am very sorry about that.

Gina, art HAS been paid for by governments (and rich and powerful people) since the beginning of civilization. It was called patronage. Basically sponsorship.

BUT it doesn't necessarily let artists be free to do their art.
Under private or public patronage you're always at the mercy of the powers that be and often you have to tread carefully.

In the '30s, Germany was taken over by the Nazis, whose leader was a failed artist.
In fact, they had a "show" called "Degenerate Art" that mocked the latest in art movements like Cubism and Surrealism. (The latter, btw, was strongly socialist under its leader Andre Derain; he would've rejected any private or capitalist funding anyway. Salvador Dali, typically, was the exception and he got booted for that.)
Ironically, as the Germans conquered, they looted many collections containting that very kind of art.

Then there's that huge portrait of Chairman Mao in Beijing. There are two and periodically, one gets taken down for restoring while the other goes up.
The restoring includes getting the angles of Mao's head just right.
The former Soviets were probably worse.

Here, in our democracy, we have the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) which has been a political hot potato for both the left and right.
In 1990, the head of the NEA, Mark Frohnmayer, vetoed applications for four performance artists who had irked the now deceased Jesse Helms, particularily Karen Finley, who performed a feminist dialog wearing only chocolate syrup.
The "NEA Four" won their case in the Supreme Court in '93, but Frohnmayer, under pressure from the religious right, especially from Pat Buchanan, stepped down in '92.
And Congress leaned on the NEA so that it stopped funding individual artists in the later '90s.

And there are so many types of art, and the NEA so underfunded, we couldn't possibly pay for it all with taxes (along with all the other government taxing and spending; where DOES all that cash go?)

Plus, the article was about CORPORATIONS spying on you, not the government (it just aided and abetted.) Since we AREN'T protected from THEM, who KNOWS what THEY could do?

You cannot be anonymous on the web. We know who you are. We know where you are. We know what, when, why and how you are.

MIB, if I had heard your comments 25 years ago ago, I would have laughed myself silly in my naivete.
Not so anymore.

According to today's news, YouTube and Viacom reached a settlement not to disclose user IDs, but it's not 100% guaranteed.

AAAARRRRGGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!

Duh.

I put "ago" twice in a row in my last post.

Sorry.

Government should not be funding art that's nasty, anti-American, or sexual. America must be restored to its original purity, one nation under God. We are the only Christian nation in the world. We need to get rid of art that's of the antiChrist.

Christian Andy are you real or a Troll?

Did you know fundamentalist Christians don't even know Jesus? He's a space alien from the planet Nazare ("he shall be called a Nazarene"). That's why the wise men saw the star or light in the sky leading the way. It was a UFO.

If artists or anyhbody wants privacy they shouldn't paint or look at nudes. Or take off their clothes. Or go to the bathroom. Or live in a nation with cameras.

Christian Andy is a real troll.

I think I'll copyright my butt. Who needs privacy? I could make a lot of money showing that.

It's a full moon tonight!

I have my secret ID written inside my knickers. If you want to know who I am, that's where you have to look!

Danacasso get real. There wasn't any time before MTV! There was juat a time with Music Television actually played music! Back in the Jurassic Period.

Oops, sorry Vicki, my bad.
I stand corrected.
Weird, though, I actually remember the time period you mention.
Am I really that old?

Danacasso I'd love to see your art! I've looked thru the site and haven't found it. Can you let us know where your art is please?

TawTew, I'm going to spill a little bit of beans here.
I once had my own area on this site where I could post my own stuff, but I never used it and I don't know if it's still active.
And I pretty much quit the group.
And some don't want me back.
Yeah, I post here in the blog, but that's about it.

That said, there's a reason why you haven't seen my art here.
There isn't any.

I do have hundreds of sketches and drawings but I need a scanner and I don't have one.
Neither does the library which is very close to me.
I would have to go to the college but I don't know which campus has labs that have scanners.
I fear it's the one that's an hour's bus ride one way as it's the one where the graphic design and multimedia labs are.

Plus, some of my work, paintings specifically, are too big for a scanner.
I do have a digital camera, but it now has some new quirks in the quality of its photos.
It also creates one hell of a flash on graphite.
It can be used on paintings and ink, but I was once informed that while it produced good images, they were surrounded by yucky looking greys and, in spite of all the computer graphics classes I've taken, I've never figured out how to solve the problem.

The one who told me this tried to tell me how to fix it but I couldn't follow em.
I'm really bad with computers.
(Actually, I'm rather bad at most things.)

Come to think of it, though, I do have some USB drives that may have some images that I made with PhotoShop in some of the aforementioned classes.
I'll see if I can find at least one of them.

Hey V.Q., from what you wrote, that seems like an invitation.
But what would happen if you're at an airport and security decides that you could be a terrorist and you have to be strip-searched?
Remember, this is the reign of George I.

So Alice, let me see if I've got this right.
You should never change clothes, go to the bathroom, clean yourself, read, have a phone, radio/stereo, camera, TV, VCR/DVD player, computer, etc., go to work, school, shopping, or leave the house for any reason, even to take out the trash.
Keep doors, windows, and shades closed 24/7, too.
Further, you should cover your eyes, nose, ears, and any other sensory organ so as to avoid having your mind corrupted.
I'm sure I left things out, but that's all I could think of.
But is that about right?

Forget privacy. Webcams everywhere! We wanna see what peeps are doing!

Danacasso, you aren't fooling anybody. If you wanted to post your art, you'd find a way. An artist traveling an hour or two to show his art, that's nothing. People do it all the time.

Hey Billy, it's not easy being an artist when you don't have money. Give up your car and come live in my shack for a while and see what you say. Ever try painting with dye and toothpaste?

Privacy vs. the rights of artists. It's a tough choice. But how can Viacom go after a million copyright violators? I don't think it's practical.

Art should be free to everybody. End of story.

Thank you, Orange Grove, for pointing out what many people take for granted.

Lack of money makes many things difficult.

"An artist traveling an hour or two to show his art, that's nothing. People do it all the time."

Well, yes. People who have ready access to transportation that will get them to the show in that hour or two do it.
I don't have that. I haven't had a car in about 5 years.
My only travel options are to get a friend who has the time and a reliable vehicle to get there quickly or to use public transportation, which will take hours each way and limit what I can carry.

And beginning in October, things are going to change very drastically.
I'm going to be in a new living situation that could slash my time on the Web by maybe as much as 90%.
Maybe completely.

And I'll have to return the monitor I'm using now to it's owner before I leave.
I'll have a tower, keyboard, and mouse.
Not exactly a complete system.

And my income is also going to get severely axed.

For an as yet undetermined period of time, I'm going to be very preoccupied.
I'm not going to have any time to give a damn whether people think I'm not fooling anyone.
My apologies, Billy. I don't mean to belittle you, but I really can't be bothered by what you say.

I've got multiple armloads of tasks that will most likely take the rest of this year and a good chunk of next year to get settled.
I'm going to be dealing with lots of bureaucrats for a long time.
And in the end, I may lose what income I have for good.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I'll explain what is going on and why I may be out of touch for perhaps as much as a year.
Until then, I have work to do.

Come on. It would take me a couple hours to get my work out to somebody? If you want to get your art out there you do it. There's a guy who paints with his foot. There's painters who have severe mental illness who paint. There's people who are dying who paint. There's people who were in concentration camps, who were threated with arrest and torture, and they painted. You sound like another spoiled American.

Hey don't pick on Danacasso. Lots of people like to fantasize about what they'd do. "I could write a book," "I could have been president," "I could have dated that hot girl in high school," that stuff. It's not a prob if it helps you feel better about yourself. We all have our fantasies. Did I tell you I'm a rock star?