Connecting Dots, from Darfur to the New York Art World and Jodi Hanel

It was so warm in New York City when I went to see the Ecotopia show at the International Center for Photography yesterday, that I wore a light jacket, open over an open necked t-shirt. This is too warm for this climate at this time of year. Home in Maine, it is colder but not enuf colder. Why is that important? Because besides all the desperately dying human coastal cultures, animal species, forests and wetlands world-wide, there is a statistical relationship between drought and strife. Global warming redistributes rain and results in drought. It makes competition for resources all the more ruthless, including in Africa.

I compared Ectopia to The Drop, at Exit Art last spring, which will be represented by Jodi Hanel on the Virtual Concert this Tuesday. That show was arguably a bit more didactic than Ectopia. Artists implicitly said things like: "don't eat endangered fish. Don't drink bottled water. Take actions that will reduce global warming." The audience for "the Drop" was smaller than the 250 people a day average that came thru Ectopia but were they any more or less moved to necessary action?

The Ectopia show is painful. It presents some of the many ways humans destroy the earth with hardly a thought. My question is, does it and should it point the way to options?

Lauren O'Neill-Butler, writing for the November Art Forum, lauded Ectopia for eschewing idealism, didactism, moralism, judgementalism and utopianism. "Saved" was her term. In other words, it successfully stood back and did not interfere with our options to continue to self-destruct unless, by free choice, we felt compelled to do so?

Excuse me. Artists do not stop being citizens of the world. Or are we all supposed to pander to the collectors, trustees and so on that profit from Exxon Chevron & so on? Art has too long been emasculated. Arguably this goes back to the arguments over abstract expressionism as a safe way to make art.

When people and species are dying, art doesn't have that option any more than anything else on this earth. The notion of art divorced from morality is as ridiculous to me as the notion of .... oh well. I won't go off on more of a tirade. I just think art history has always been about content and has often straddled the divide with patrons with questionable moral credentials. The O'Neill- Butler review concludes with a relevant question: "the curators seem to question how far empathy really takes us, and how much longer it will be before the future is now."