Posts by Peter Cox
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Steven. A point I think you have missed:
Artistic innovation.
Now, art can be unusual in the sense – it’s not like a car paint job or, well – pretty much any other commercial product - in that sometimes the work that has the most utility is not immediately apparent.
That is to say, that sometimes the great work an artist does may not be immediately understood or acknowledged. It may take everyone a few years to catch up. Now obviously, that is not always the case: just because an artist’s work is not understood at the time, it may not necessarily be any good, nor because an work is praised at the time, does it necessarily mean it’s simply in fashion. But it is the case that, particularly in case of the visual arts, that many of the great innovators have not been acknowledged at the time they sold their work.
Frankly, I feel it would be nice if we had a system which acknowledged the possibility of long term value, and rewarded artistic innovation, and the pushing of boundaries. And I don’t just mean this in terms of aesthetics, but also themes and message.
It would be nice to get out of a system, where artists no longer face the reality that investing in something that people may not catch up on for another five to ten years won’t equate to being destitute. They can actually make some money from their forward thinking, as well as the art investors, and the inevitable rip-offs that will spring up when it becomes the fashion.
I think this is particularly important in NZ where, at the risk of seeming unpatriotic, historically, some of the reactions of our mass media to artistic innovation make us look like a fucking backwater. Witness the total farce of the newspaper coverage over the Et.Al. Venice work.
That was just fucking embarrassing. Frontseat didn’t help much either, I might add.
But anyway, point made before I drift off onto another subject…
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Rats. Too slow.
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I don’t know, it just seems so precious and bourgeoisie for artists to expect special treatment. If I get a flash paint job on my Ford Escort and subsequently get a much better price for it, do I owe a cut to the spray painter? I doubt it! For a spray painter is a mere working class artisan, and not deserving of the recognition of a big, posh artist type who has certain refined lifestyle expectations, apart from needing to fund hisor her's beret collection.
Yeah, you're right. Fuck those artists, they've had it too good for too long, especially in New Zealand. Look at McCahon for example. Posh wanker.
Especially when those poor arts dealers/collectors that have been forced to live in cold hovels eating gruel.
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Actually, I have two copies of that series on DVD (given as presents). As penance for calling d4j a drunken hobo maybe I could sent it to Russell and he could use it as a prize or something?
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May I just take this opportunity to say that the first series of Black Books is possibly the greatest 6 eps of tele ever made.
Millwall, Millwall,
You're really awful,
And all your girlfriends
are unfulfilled and alienated.Well - I guess you had to be there.
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Dear Lord. It's like walking down the street and having some drunken hobo leap out of a darkened ally and start hollering crazy shit at you.
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Well, that's got nothing to do with the comments I just made.
But whatever - the circumstances of the case are horrifying. The eye witness accounts are horrifying. Watching the video, the woman is saying that she's had no choice to do the things she's done - that all her parenting, and the parenting of her partner has been reasonable response to the child's behaviour - that it was a last resort, they hated doing it blah, blah. Hell, maybe she even convinced herself of it. From what we've seen since, that looks a lot like bollocks.
But whatever - if you want to convince yourself that this woman is a good judge of reasonable force, the family environment she created was a good one, and CYFS or whatever is to blame then good luck to you.
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@dave
OH and Peter, how on earth can the Parents maintain a S59 defence - the guys not a child. Great defence for repealing S59 you have there.
Yeah, I'm sure their mentality would have been completely different when the kid was 15. Give me a break. Besides which it was, (as plainly pointed out in Russell's original post) the lady herself that got involved in the whole section59 debate.
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Well, maybe it's naive.
At the moment though I have reason to believe that some serious abusers feel that what they are doing is 'reasonable force' (because of their particular circumstance). Clearly they're wrong.
Maybe it's incredibly naive to think that 'sending a message' would really make any difference to their mentality. But if I may draw a parallel with other types of message sending - plays, books, films, essays, and the like I'll quote Kurt Vonnegut on the subject:
(from the PEN conference, 1973):
...the Vietnam War has proved this... Virtually every American Writer was against our participation in that civil war. We raised all hell about the war for years and years - with novels and poems and plays and short stories. We dropped on our complacent society the literary equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.
I will now report to you the power of such a bomb. It has the explosive force of a very large banana creme pie - a pie two metres in diameter, twenty centimetres thick, and dropped from a height of ten metres or more...
What can tyrants, large and small, learn from my speech so far? That [messages] are harmless. They may safely be allowed all the freedoms which birds have - to sing as they please, to hop about, to fly...
Thus ends the public part of my speech...
I have a few additional words for you, my colleagues. Please don't repeat them outside this room. While it is true that we American fiction writers failed to modify the course of the war, we have reason to suspect that we have poisoned the minds of thousands, or perhaps even millions of American young people. Our hope is that the poison will make them worse than useless in unjust wars.
We shall see.
Cheers Kurt!
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@ craig
Well, if the 'wife beating shit bag' was telling himself that what he was doing was okay because there was a law saying he was allowed to use reasonable force on his wife, then I could see the parallel.
But to extend your logic, you're saying if we introduced such a law, it would make no difference to the behaviour of wife beaters (because they're not rational human beings, so said law would make no difference to their behaviour). Of course I can't prove it, but common sense seems to dictate that wife beating would increase, and likely the severity of wife beating would increase to boot.