Making sarcastic comments about the intellectual and philosophical qualities of advertising or financial people is taking cheap shots in front of an open goal. But if they are asking for it, they are asking for it. Last weekend I drove past a billboard of the Belgian financial multinational Fortis on which I read in big letters (images on billboards are overrated anyway): “Life is a curve, where on this curve are you?” (and where on his curve is their new shareholder, the Libean leader Khadaffi? Or, where on this curve is Fortis itself? I’d say on a downslope….).

My first thought was: “Life is a curve? … No, it isn’t” Actually, it may be one of the most stupid comments ever printed on a billboard poster. Many beautiful, insightful, philosophical things have been said and written about life. Socrates wrote that true wisdom is in knowing how little we know about life, I wonder if he would have thought that deeming life ‘a curve’, was perhaps oversimplifying matters a bit. We all know the analogies that have become bad clichés: how life is a rollercoaster, a river. Or perhaps the bizarre quotes like “life is like a tin of sardines, we are all looking for the key.” Every era gets the quotes it deserves and these times may not be bizarre, a cliché, or wise. Our era might deserve populist, unintelligent quotes. Actually, I don’t know who to feel more sorry for, the idiot copywriter that wrote it, or the idiot that approved of it and paid several million euros for this campaign.

At the same time I felt rather offended actually. “Where on this curve are you?” they have the nerve to ask me. Not only do those arrogant people at Fortis have the poor wit to inform about the alleged ‘curviness’ of life, they immediately try to convince me that this is a given fact and, since I undoubtedly accept this fallacy, ask me about my location on this curve. For the sake of argument: would life have been a curve (which, by intelligent and logical lines of reasoning, it isn’t), it would have been completely impossible for anyone to say where on this curve you are. Theoretically, it could be possible to say where you were in life at a given point, after your death, but I doubt that Fortis has informants in the hereafter.

In a press release Adrian Martorana, the Fortis exec that is guilty of this so-called ‘corporate campaign’, states”The ‘Life is a curve’ campaign encourages people to think about their financial needs today and plan for tomorrow, with the help of a trusted partner such as Fortis.” And to make matters even worse: “We carried out extensive global research over 12 months to make sure our message was relevant in today’s environment.” I don’t expect bankers to be good philosophers, I do expect them to able to do a bit of decent research, draw some solid conclusions from it and act according to them. I might be expecting too much.

I should mentally have linked Fortis with qualities such as ‘future financial needs”and ‘trusted financial partner’. How on earth this should have been done by bad philosophy is beyond me. The creatives at their advertising agency Grey EMEA were probably a bit too high on bad cocaine. When they listened to the lyrics of their superior in philospophy, Jessica Simpson, who begins her song “Walkin’ Round in a circle” with the sentence “Life is a curve BALL”. There is virtually no job easier than that of creating a corporate advertising campaign to build a brand image. That’s why, when you fail as a proper artist or writer, you can still work in advertsing (and if you even fail there: ‘corporate advertising’).

But perhaps all this is my mistake. The fact that all I think about is their poor ability in logical reasoning, and not their superior qualities in banking, is all my mistake. Or maybe I just have it wrong. Maybe ‘life is a curve’ actually makes wonderful sense. I don’t think I’ll be taking any of my banking to the lovely people at Fortis. But they probably don’t care anyway. I don’t have a clue about where I am on my curve.

Should you injure yourself while laughing, please note that we cannot be held responsible for that.

Should you not get the joke, we cannot be held responsible for that either.
We could, however, help you out a bit.

Like I mentioned a couple of postings ago, I account my liking of New York largely to a mild tv addiction. Walking through Manhattan for the first time felt really familiar. You’ve probably seen a cheesy flick or read a cheap novel where at some point someone says: “It felt like coming homing to a place where I’d never been.” It was something like that.

A very cosmopolitan thing to be able to say to people: “Oh, you’re going to other side of the world? I know a good place to eat.” This works even better in my case, where seemingly everyone I know is turning vegetarian… in some cases with the exception of fish, which actually does not make you a vegetarian at all (…but in the back of my mind, the late mr. Cobain is wailing ‘it’s okay to eat fish ‘cos they, don’t have any feeeeeelin’…). Anyhow; why does that work even better? Because the ‘place to eat’ in this case is a very vegetarian friendly place and those kind of places are a teeny bit harder to find than a ‘cow and chicken processing’ cholesterol palace. I’m talking about ‘Quantum Leap‘ in the West Village.

I visited that place a couple of times, because of the great ambiance, the friendly staff, the nice location… but the main reason is: they make absolutely breathtakingly, apetite fulfillingly(?), gorgeous food. I don’t vegetarian beacuse I don’t like the taste of meat, I love it. When I eat vegetarian food it is because of my poor conscious. The vegetarian options at Quantum Leap however are so incredibly good that I would turn full time vegetarian straight away, would I live anywhere near that place. Best burgers I ever ate, but no one gets hurt. But the same goes for all the other meal options we’ve tried.

Quantum Leap alone is plenty of reason for me to want to go back to Manhattan. And I haven’t even told you about Gobo restaurant in the West Village yet… what a yummy place!

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.

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.

Question for all you modern art aficionados out there; New abstractionist paintings… what the bleep are they about?
Classical modernism was a typical response to figuration; a new way of looking at the world and art itself. But still; this stream was deeply rooted in ‘real life’. New abstraction seems to mainly be a response to the classical modernists. An attempt to show how they (you know… Mondriaan, Kandinsky, Malevistj etc) failed to bring about their desired utopia. Are these new abstractionist artists (i’m thinking Armleder, Rockenschaub, Buren) going to do any better?

The postmodern abstract painter does not paint what the biological eye sees, instead they focus on what our minds eye sees. In fact they try to open that proverbial eye with their art. They want to to make the viewer aware of themselves with images from esoterical, non-existing worlds and sub-conscious feelings. Paintings I would like to describe as ‘useless rubbish’.

It’s not that I am too much of a beta-minded person to be interested in things that my eyes can’t see, it’s just that I think that there is no medium so incapable of communicating those messages as a painters’ canvas. If your wish is to convey your philosophies of other better worlds, the mysteries of the universe, the power of the mind or whatever; write a book, make a film…. or do a dance… don’t paint it. That sucks dude.

A lot of autonomous artists may look down at artdirectors and copywriters at advertising agencies, regarding them untalented corporate sellouts, there is one important lesson that artists could learn from them. Any medium you make should have enough power to able to communicate its message on its own, without explanation. If you need to read a book to be able to appreciate a painting, you should just have written a book.

I guess most of us know by now what ‘Web 2.0 ‘ means, right? In idealistic terminology we’d call it ‘the people are in control’ (which, obviously, is probably a lie, but it’s a nice lie….).

CultBlender aims to help revolutionize the artworld. Indeed, we’re pretty ambitious. It’s time for art 2.0; ‘giving control over art back to the people. It’s all very 2007; Users as designers, audience generated content you name it, we got it. Taking control away from the powers that be, anarchy in the creative industry… As they would say in Seinfeld: “yada, yada, yada.”

Web 2.0 sounds really great, but it also means we’ve ended up with a whole lotta crap, clotting up our beautifull communication highway. We wouldn’t and couldn’t want to do that to the art world (also because art is not democratic like the web should be). So let’s just see art 2.0 as philosophy. Involve people with art as much as you can, you can even let them steer a bit…. just keep your foot near the brake.

Relevant question: does this world really need CultBlender United? Isn’t it already perfect the way it is? It’s so beautifully interactive and arty out here. Why would we want a couple of creative geeks to come and f… it up?
Some people just keep on dreaming about being awake. On our blog we want to keep you all posted on our dreams and how they develop. Just another day inthe life of people writing online art history…