Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.

This is essentially why I hate the “win the future” slogan so much—because America winning the future implicitly means that India and China and whoever else we’re scared of coming up from under us will be losing. (That, and it just sounds stupid.) This is perhaps ridiculously obvious but I don’t think many Americans understand just how poor most Indians and Chinese are, or how much of the American dream as it currently stands depends on them staying that way.

Swarthmore history professor Timothy Burke puts it well:

The number and density of feelings of this kind in my life lately has a lot to do with why I found President Obama’s “Win the Future” slogan to be one of the more repellant political visions of the past three decades. I wish it were merely an empty marketing slogan. I wish it were merely a cynical toss-off. I wish it were merely as silly and irrelevant as “Whip Inflation Now”. But it’s not. “Win the Future” is the central credo of the people who are steadily losing us any hope of a future that improves upon the past. It is the slogan of misdirection and humbug, a motto whose best translation is, “Nothing up my sleeves, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”.

Behind the slogan was the 21st Century version of dark satanic mills: we must be ever more dire and invasive in the way we ratchet competitive pressures into education and work, ever more aggressive in how we extract productivity at every stage of social and economic life. The speed setting on the treadmill must go up each week without fail. The usual range of boogeymen was trotted out: in China they are prepared to eat their own young, so we must as well! In India they chain their elementary-school students to a slave barge fueled by the study of calculus and SQL, and so must we!

Yet even as we condemn the dark satanic mills of the 19th century we’re constructing those of the 21st. Hendrick Hertzberg wrote today on the royal wedding and the poem from which that ominous phrase originates:

For me, the best part was when everyone in the Abbey and beyond—everyone: Princes William, Charles, and Philip; consorts and cousins; archbishops and vicars; Elton John and David Cameron; soldiers and choirboys; the thousands gathered around the Trafalgar Square jumbotron—sang “Jerusalem,” all four magnificent verses:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold!
Bring me my Arrows of desire!
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

Amazing. (As amazing as “Amazing Grace.”) Think of William Blake two centuries ago, aflame with prophetic mysticism and revolutionary rapture, writing these deathless, daring lines in obscurity. Just three or four years earlier, he had been arrested and charged with sedition for making treasonable remarks against the King—who, at the time, was none other than George III, nemesis of America and ancestor of today’s bridegroom. The poet was acquitted—in court then, at court now, in every English heart and hearth, palace to bedsit. The U.K. has no official anthem; “God Save the Queen” usually takes precedence, but it’s “Jerusalem” that makes the tears flow. There has to be something right about a country that expresses its patriotism in a song that denounces industrial oppression and then cries in ecstasy, “Bring me my Arrows of desire!”

Meanwhile that same country is increasingly doing everything it can to “extract productivity at every stage of social and economic life”–but sorry, Brits, we’ve already got dibs on the future.

Baratunde Thurston on the birth certificate.

See also Adam Serwer on asking for papers and Justin Elliott on Trump’s history of racial discrimination.

Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably–his mother was an heiress–to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin–Ovid, Virgil, and Horace–and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen.

Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.

Judith eventually runs away from home to escape an unwanted marriage and commits suicide when she becomes pregnant with the child of the manager of a theatre where she hoped to work; Shakespeare–well, you know.

Jill Lepore takes the idea behind Woolf’s thought experiment and gets the facts on Ben Franklin and his sister Jane:

Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.

Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.

At 17, he ran away from home. At 15, she married: she was probably pregnant, as were, at the time, a third of all brides. She and her brother wrote to each other all their lives: they were each other’s dearest friends. (He wrote more letters to her than to anyone.) His letters are learned, warm, funny, delightful; hers are misspelled, fretful and full of sorrow. “Nothing but troble can you her from me,” she warned. It’s extraordinary that she could write at all.

“I have such a Poor Fackulty at making Leters,” she confessed.

He would have none of it. “Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.” He was, sadly, right.

She had one child after another; her husband, a saddler named Edward Mecom, grew ill, and may have lost his mind, as, most certainly, did two of her sons. She struggled, and failed, to keep them out of debtors’ prison, the almshouse, asylums. She took in boarders; she sewed bonnets. She had not a moment’s rest.

And still, she thirsted for knowledge. “I Read as much as I Dare,” she confided to her brother. She once asked him for a copy of “all the Political pieces” he had ever written. “I could as easily make a collection for you of all the past parings of my nails,” he joked. He sent her what he could; she read it all. But there was no way out.

While at the Tate I was also struck by this piece by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, called “Tree of 12 meters.” From the Tate’s description:

At a time when many artists were abandoning traditional sculpture techniques, Penone began to use perhaps the most ancient method–carving. He took industrially sawn units of timber and, using chisels, followed the knots in the planks to remove rings of wood and expose the shape of a tree. His work looks at the relationship of industry and nature, suggesting that a sensitive approach to materials is still possible in an industrialized world.

Penone’s trees contain both the hope of carving a more natural world out of our industrialized one, and the sober knowledge that it will still be a construction, a thinner imitation of the original whose scope is limited by the initial change. 

The process itself is clearly part of the work’s statement about mass production for Western consumption, but it’s also something unto itself—art as mass employment, or industrial-scale highbrow art, or even, to put it more controversially, sweatshop art? I keep coming back to Ben Davis’s “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” which I first read a few weeks ago and have been thinking about ever since. Davis’s theses seek to outline class relations outside and within the “art world”/“sphere of visual arts,” arguing that “since class is a fundamental issue for art, art can’t have any clear idea of its own nature unless it has a clear idea of the interests of different classes”—the different classes being middle class (“having an individual, self-directed relationship to production”), capitalist/ruling class (“administering and maximizing the profit produced by the labor of others”), and working class (“selling abstract labor power”).

Ai Weiwei, as The Artist, is middle class, while those he employs to make the actual sunflower seeds are working class. Ai’s craftspeople, to use Davis’s language, “produce creative products not as an expression of their individuality, but simply as piecework.” Ai “made three or four,” he told the Guardian. “But none of them was any good.” The division of labor between conceptual/creative and productive/manual is of course not limited to art (though interestingly, the skill here resides not with the “creative” designer but the producers).

And of course, Ai is far from the first artist not to produce his own artwork—to name just two of the most famous, Duchamp famously displayed “readymade” objects manufactured by unknown workers, and Sol Le Witt, a pioneer of the conceptual art movement who routinely produced drawings by giving teams of assistants written instructions, described his approach as such: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Ai both embraces the conceptual approach to art and insists upon something more; while the concept is his sole contribution to the piece, the execution is not a perfunctory affair; rather, it is a two-plus-year process that is central to the art. Indeed, Ai goes beyond the process of making the piece itself to reveal the production of the very materials of which it is composed: in showing all thirty stages of the porcelain production process, from the mining of rock to the mixing of “porcelain sludge” to the firing and painting of the seeds themselves, Ai draws attention to the essential materiality of art, to the processes we tend to take for granted. Material itself is of course an essential aspect of artwork—gouache or watercolor, marble or concrete, film or digital—but usually for the qualities of the material itself rather than the labor or resources used to make those materials.

Davis argues that “contemoporary visual art” is distinct from other “creative industries” that are “more fully organized around capitalist production”—“video games, film and television all imply amounts of creative labor employed on a massive, impersonal and very specialized level, to greater or lesser degrees.” Interestingly, Ai’s work, though it certainly falls in the category of “contemporary visual art,” is similar to creative industries like video games and movies in that its production employed somewhere in the ballpark of 1600 people, each of whom were engaged in specialized tasks—firing the seeds in huge kilns, or painting—the most skilled workers in three strokes, less efficient ones in four or five—the seeds’ distinctive stripes. Ai’s “designing” of the artwork for production by thousands of Chinese workers is analogous to the designing of sneakers or clothing or cars by Western athletes or fashion designers or engineers. Yet Ai’s work is unlike these industries in that it is undertaken without a profit motive—or is it? Of course, much contemporary visual art does command a significant price; indeed, a bagful of seeds is to go up for auction at Sotheby’s and is expected to fetch some £120,000.  But even if a bag or two of seeds is sold off, the work itself can’t be, not really—what private collector could display all 100 million seeds? Even if someone were to buy it and relocate it elsewhere, it would lose something in transation to another space—part of the work’s power comes from the implications of the industrial backdrop of the Turbine Hall itself.

In any case, it was certainly a profitable enterprise for the workers who produced the seeds, many of whom were on the verge of bankruptcy before Ai’s project came to town. Speaking with the Guardian, Ai stated “Historically, the town’s only activity has been making porcelainware for over 1,000 years. The super-high-quality skill for generations has been making imperial porcelainware. In modern days, however, it has become very commercialised.” Ai is simultaneously undercutting and reinforcing the commercialization of art in the town. While the work itself is not a commercial product, the production of the seeds is, for most workers, just another job—so much so that at the end of the video, Ai says “You feel like you might have to make some more or make some other kind of project which can meet their needs.”

But are we really “meeting the needs” of Ai’s workers, or is that just incidental to the fact that they are meeting our need to consume? As Searle writes,  “Most contemporary Chinese art is a product made for western consumption, just as willow-pattern plates or porcelain vases were shipped out in huge quantities for the western market.” Ai’s highbrow work has, ultimately, the same consumer base as the lowbrow mass-produced porcelain vase. This recalls Davis’s identification of the “second contradiction” of visual arts: it is “split between notions of art as profession and as vocation, and therefore comes into contradiction with itself at every moment where what an artist wants to express comes into contradiction with the demands of making a living; in a situation where a minority dominates most of society’s resources, this is often—“ Davis leaves off abruptly here, yet we get the gist: that which is expressed by professional artists is, if not necessarily constrained, somehow influenced by the demands and tastes of a resource-wealthy minority. In the art world, that minority consists of museums, galleries, foundations, universities, wealthy collectors, dealers and the like; in the broader world, it is we Westerners who are the ruling class, the consumers of art whose wants must be satisfied. But has Ai managed to mobilize his position as a creative middle-class individual with cutural heft to transform our wants into something that meets the needs of a village whose traditional trade has been decimated by machinization? (Searle again: “The town that once made porcelain for the imperial court has been saved from bankruptcy by making sunflower seeds. It is absurd.”) Or is Ai simply using the cheap labor of a desperate population to enhance his own standing in the elite world of Western contemporary art? The image of a well-off, cosmopolitan, culturally fluent man supervising the tedious labor of hundreds of workers, largely impoverished women, sits uneasily.

Is his (their?) work a charitable undertaking or an exploitative one? Our discomfort reveals our own uncertainty about the broader project of globalized production—a tool for poverty reduction or an exploitative race to the bottom?—and our studied ignorance of the foundation of labor upon which the creative work of the middle class rests.

¹  The prohibition is particularly interesting in light of Ai Weiwei’s recent arrest—not to remotely suggest that the two are equivalent, but rather as a jumping point for thinking about when and why we deem it acceptable for governments to control or alter art and artists, made all the more interesting for the drastic contrast between the two actions. For the record, I think the prohibition on walking on the seeds, though perhaps a touch overcautious, is defensible; the Chinese government’s detainment of Ai is absolutely not, and I’m hoping for his speedy and safe release. Still, thinking about the materiality of art, and the potential danger of materials, requires us to think about the restrictions we place on certain materials for various reasons, and the restrictions that we implicitly put on how art can be made and experienced. The motivations behind the decision to arrest Ai, on the other hand, are very conceptual–the Chinese government is concerned about the danger posed by Ai’s ideas, not by danger posed by the physical piece itself.

But in the last few years, coffee yields have plummeted here and in many of Latin America’s other premier coffee regions as a result of rising temperatures and more intense and unpredictable rains, phenomena that many scientists link partly to global warming….The shortage of high-end Arabica coffee beans is also being felt in New York supermarkets and Paris cafes, as customers blink at escalating prices. Purveyors fear that the Arabica coffee supply from Colombia may never rebound — that the world might, in effect, hit “peak coffee.”

Maybe now we’ll do something about climate change.

The smart thing for us to do right now is to impose a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax, to be phased in at 5 cents a month beginning in 2012, with all the money going to pay down the deficit. Legislating a higher energy price today that takes effect in the future, notes the Princeton economist Alan Blinder, would trigger a shift in buying and investment well before the tax kicks in. With one little gasoline tax, we can make ourselves more economically and strategically secure, help sell more Chevy Volts and free ourselves to openly push for democratic values in the Middle East without worrying anymore that it will harm our oil interests. Yes, it will mean higher gas prices, but prices are going up anyway, folks. Let’s capture some it for ourselves.

America, you have built your house at the foot of a volcano. That volcano is now spewing lava from different cracks and is rumbling like it’s going to blow. Move your house!” In this case, “move your house” means “end your addiction to oil.”