Even though I wasn’t raised in a dysfunctional family, which doesn’t help if you’re going to be a professional artist by the way, I’ve learned a lot of social skills from watching sitcoms. Some things I saw in the Cosby Show, Family Ties and Cheers (as everyone did, growing up in the eighties) I’ve used myself, but mostly it’s helped me with understanding about peoples’ behaviour. Sitcoms are great in enlarging situations. The little bizarre things, showing how people get caught up in impossible problems and how they struggle to get out of it. And at the same time they relativate it with a laugh. All the way from I love Lucy and All in the Family to Seinfeld, Friends and beyond. From geenies (I dream of Jeannie) to extraterrestrials (Out of this world, 3rd Rock from the sun), from the very everyday (Curb your enthusiasm) to the animated (the Simpsons). Each and everyone of those shows can teach you a lot about behaviour. You just have to learn to play it all down a little.

My personal favourite series is Mad About You, starring Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt as the couple Paul and Jamie Buchman. I guess the slightly bizarre combination of that show and the album Painted from memory by Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharrach are for a great part responsible for my love of New York. Neither of both were made in New York, but -hey- it’s a feeling. I can’t explain it.

Anyway, I’ve just been up all night since I seem to be developing insomnia and I’ve watched a couple of shows on dvd. Again. Sure, I could have gone through a biography on Jackson Pollock, read an essay about the recent works by Gerhard Richter or the significance of Thomas Hirschorn, but who would have? I decided to have an injection of human behaviour, great storylines and a couple of good laughs. And the acting aint half bad either.

Where Seinfeld is typically described as ‘a show where nothing happens’, Mad About You would be a show where things go on that you could actually imagine happen to you. Perhaps not much, and not too exciting… but amazingly funny, if you know how to look at it.

Now, is there some unexpected intellectual point to me outing myself as a Mad About You fanatic? No, of course not. I’ve had some very tiring discussions about high culture versus low culture with different sorts of people. Most strenuous were those with people who informed me that they felt that there is no difference between the two. Which always turned out to be ‘bs’. Most artists are not very open and/or liberal at all. They’re actually quite conservative and arrogant. To get back to the point: personally I wouldn’t classify Mad About You as ‘high culture’ and yes: I do make a distinction between the two. But I can’t always stomach so called ‘high culture’. Sometimes I have no use for creativity that ‘challenges my outlook on existence’ or ‘my interaction with space’. But I always enjoy watching human behaviour. Especially in condensed form. I just have more use for it. Which, perhaps, makes Mad About You (again: low culture) more important than the pharmaceuticals series by Damien Hirst (high… I guess) or the light-tubes of Donald Judd. Sitcoms have earned their place in cultural history. Low culture rules man.

Coming up on Cultblender.org; an online exposition by New Mexican artist Sylvia Ortiz Domney. For those of you who can’t wait any longer, following is an outtake from the interview I had Sylvia.

CB: what are the main influences in your work?
“The major influence on my art style is Folk Art and Ancient Sculpture – Folk Art because I so love the idea of the visual work being created by all people, not only from a specialist – Folk Artists, Self Taught and the ancient sculptors primarily create art from a need to speak of their immediate world and the spiritual world - there is a power in their works. It is that immediate understanding of the power of their work that I find so compelling.”


CB: Is there a message in your art? And if so, what is it?
“I don’t believe that there is a difference between the actions of an artist or a secretary, which is what my work was before starting my art career. Our actions in life, either as a positive force or negative force, are the important things of our lives. It is not what I paint, just as it is not important if I go to church – what is the Important Message is how I treat people, do I feel compassion and empathy for the lives, not only of my loved ones, but for the man, woman, and child from another culture and nation.”

CB: You said your main artistic influence is folk art, how does that compare to your using mdoren technology for your art, like photography and computer?
“The use of the Internet, I think is in itself an art form, it is the new canvas about and for the human race – It is a remarkable liberation of the creative force in humans, both as communication, image making, and political power. The computer, coupled with the Internet, is used my millions of people to create their individual art and talking space. People do art now that never thought to do so before, thousands of people write now because they have an online community to speak to. I use the internet, like everyone else to reach other people, to share my visual creations with someone else and to see what other artists and people are creating - As to the “quality or what is good and what is bad, those titles are not important to me, what is important is the excitement and the idea of the democracy and freedom to expression.”

You can read the entire interview and the online exposition of Sylvia Ortiz Domney recent works on cultblender.org soon.

Always a topical subject; credit cards, debts and intrest rates. I guess we are all aware of the malpractices of these financial multinationals: you get a piece of plastic, they encourage you to use it, you get into debt, they own your ass. Yes, it is evil. No I would not want to waste precious blogging space on that alone. So why this post then?

This morning in one of the free Dutch papers I read a small article about Edward Yingling (not that’s not a joke, it’s the dude’s actual name). Mr. Yingling is the president of the American Bankers Association and, as such, he has got something to say on behalf of the credit card companies. His defense on that matter is a strange one: ‘If somebody starts behaving in an increaslingly risky manner, like losing creditpoints because he or she does not fulfil his or her monthly payments we have to ablo to raise the intrest rates. It’s a risky business we’re in.’

I found this somewhat surprising. What he’s saying is that institutions loan too much money to people so they will not be able to pay them back. Then, because they have created a risk for themselves, they find an argument in this to raise the amount of intrest you have to pay for money you have already loaned because they would reduce that risk. In fact the opposite is true: since you will now have to pay even more, the chance that you will ever be able to fulfill you debt is even smaller now. So the action the credit card companies are taking are not reducing, but increasing their so-called risk.

For credit card companies, there is no risk. All the risk lies with the gullible consumer who gets lured into biting off more than they can chew. And from that moment on… your money goes to the credit card companies. All of it. you will try to pay of loans with new loans and like quicksand, everytime you try and struggle, you just sink deeper.

There are people that feel that a free society means that we should be able to say and do everything we want, anytime we want and anywhere we want. We should, for example, be allowed to have sex in the streets. I have actually read some columns by respected authors that were defending that view. Nonetheless, I can only disagree and not because of all that ‘great freedom comes with great responsibility’ blahblah.

I do agree that what you do in your own home is your business. As long as you don’t hurt anyone; I don’t care, sculpt midgets out of carrots, dip them in chocolate pudding and shove them wherever you like. But the streets are, if you’ll excuse the very contemporary phrase, public domain. No matter how ‘free’ a society is, in a public domain you need rules. And one of those rules should be that you don’t have sex in the streets. And no: I don’t think that’s a very conservative view on my part. Fact remains that there are people that find the idea of being confronted with people having sex very offensive. I must admit that there have been an occasion or two where I would not have cared for that sight myself. So, if we were to allow people to have sex in the streets, that would mean that freedom was stolen from them, those innocent passersby. There is no way for people to be able to avoid having to see others having sex if all that sex was going on in the streets. You need to get out and do some shopping once in a while don’t you? Therefor I agree that it should remain illegal to do so

Away from sex, on to mobile phone conversations in the public domain. This week alone I have heard someone break up with her boyfriend, I heard about someones grandmother that wet her bed and how her granddaughter is really tired of having to go see her and I overheard someone complain about the receptionist at work (apparently she is a complete bitch). I can imagine people taking offense to being confronted with all that personal information as well. And if your travelling in a crowded train like I do everyday, a lot of times it is quite impossible to simply ‘go away’ and avoid it. Luckily I enjoy a bit of sleazy gossip, so I don’t mind terribly, but that’s beside the point. Should ’speaking out loud into a mobile phone in public’ be banned as well? Don’t the same rules apply as when it comes to having sex at the bus-stop, or at the grocers?

I guess not. People speak. And some people have no shame whatsoever. And even though I don’t consider the three people in the examples above as very civilised human beings, they’re merely having a conversation they could have been having with a person sitting across them. Perhaps they would be speaking a little less loud then, but still. I wouldn’t want to ban any subjects from being discussed, ever. And there are already rules about the amount of noise you’re allowed to make. And -more or less- normal speech is well within those boundaries.

As far as I am concerned, you can’t have sex in the streets, but at least you talk about it on your mobile phone. Isn’t freedom wonderful?