The Gutter Art Critic

"That’s just, like, your opinion, man!                                                 -The Dude                   ‘Fuck the Facts,’ the slogan of the young and passionate, has been around for at least as long as I can remember. It was at least so when I was an angsty teenager. Today though, we are truly living in a post-fact world, where facts do not so much not matter, as much as what matters is who gets to use them and how. So in effect the facts indeed do not matter. This is obviously a contradictory statement.   But contradictions are logical fallacies and so is the statement ‘this statement is false.’ You get the point.                 The world in which we live is now entirely hypernormal. We have other words for this state of affairs, fake, unreal, obscurantist, post-truth, but hypernormal fits so well with our current way of life. Strange and terrible things are happening all the time. Events are seemingly coming and going and are entirely out of our control. There

                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

While we may have been wrong and unnecessarily hopeful about Bernie Sanders the presidential candidate, there is perhaps one ‘good’ outcome from the fiasco that has become the Sanders presidential campaign, The Myth of Bernie . Long story short, the myth suggests that it is better to be a failed presidential candidate (with its mythical and fantasmatic core preserved) than a failed president. The unfulfilled potential of the candidate cannot be taken in the same light as the unfulfilled promises of an acting president. We may now forever sit and debate ‘what would’ve been’ had Sanders won. The mythmaking process was kicked off properly in 2016 on the heels of the Democratic National Convention when Bernie Sanders was effectively pushed out by the Democratic party to make way for Hillary Clinton (herself a mythologized figure inside the Clinton supporter camp). The recent events saw a replay of 2016, though the Sanders campaign was, from the very beginning, already much weaker than it

Why is the US so in love with its military? Following the first Democratic debate, the name Tulsi Gabbard became the most searched keyword on Google.   Why?   The first obvious answer is that she is new, doesn’t appear to be in the pockets of some elite corporation, yet, and did really well rebuffing her opponents’ ridiculous claims about Afghanistan, the Taliban and 9/11.   She was also smart or savvy enough to appear on Joe Rogan a few weeks ago, garnering millions of views..   So why is it that despite all this attention she also appears to have no answers to the issues of class, income inequality, the wealth gap, student debt and the massive credit debt, among other pressing mainstream issues like the environment, race and gender issues, and so on.   Her answer seem to be a rather flat, ‘I’m military, I know what it’s like to be in the military, protracted wars are silly, send everybody home.’   Granted, the trillions the US spends on proxy wars is precisely one of the bigg