The Gutter Art Critic

                November 1989. Prague. The Berlin Wall came down just a few short weeks prior and a few hundred students are marching from the top of Vysehrad hill toward Wenceslas Square. At some point the group is seen to diverge from its set path. The theory is that a plain clothes secret police officer had ingratiated himself in the front of the group and with the explicit order to lead the students into a narrow corridor where the police, suited up in riot gear, was waiting. Blindsighted, the students marched, believing that in a just a few hours they will be home in their beds after making their voices heard. What followed was a televised spectacle of violence as the riot police in white helmets corralled the crowd into a narrow pedestrian underpassage where each protester could be individually beaten in a kind of a medieval gauntlet. Busted heads and knocked out teeth. Dubbed the Velvet Revolution, the 1989 uprising against the oppressive government was anything but. It was pe

The zombie apocalypse is already here and it’s happening, though not as fast as the movies tell us. Something is afoot, but nobody seems to know precisely what.   Social and news media warn us of impending disaster, financial, ecological, environmental, from space.   During the 20 th century, science supplanted religion in doom-saying and prosyletizing of the end of days.   According to mainstream scientific research, we will have entered a point of no return on climate change by 2050.   Prognoses of mass extinction events are a matter of when, not if.   No longer do we rely on dates painstakingly teased out of the Bible, but on algorithms in tech and finance to tell us how to adjust our attitudes to global catastrophe, how to prepare for widespread networks failure and disintegration of all that currently is.   It’s easier to get behind numbers than to rely on notions of faith.   Y2K was averted and these days most don’t really remember the event itself or the lead-up to it.   In