May 2013 – Page 104

Needing A Nook To Be Free

Hugo Macdonald counters the view that small spaces are claustrophobic:

Time once was when rooms in houses were divided into small spaces – each with a prescribed function. It sounds ridiculous. You cooked in the kitchen, ate dinner in the dining room, lived in the living room and so on. The rise of open-plan living after the war was “modern” and progressive, thanks to the dictum of Le Corbusier. It was healthy to let air circulate. And partition walls went the way of the dodo – the enemy of the architect, the preserve of the uncultured. Open-plan living was aspirational. In the 1980s you were nobody if you couldn’t cook, entertain, run a bath and lie in bed all in the same room. A cavernous converted warehouse apartment with exposed brick was the stuff of dreams – endless, uninterrupted space to live and party in. …

We’re constantly reminded that more of us are living alone in singledom than ever before. Could it be that the lofty open-plan living we’re so accustomed to, where couples live in the same single space, is in fact stifling us to distraction and divorce? “Needing space” in a relationship is a little misleading – it should be reworded to “needing spaces”.

Low Prices, High Art

Maria Godoy admires the work of Brendan O’Connell, painter of Walmart tableaux:

Wal-Mart stores, he notes, are “probably one of the most trafficked interior spaces in the world.” In the tall, open, cathedral-like ceilings of Wal-Mart’s big-box stores, he sees parallels to church interiors of old. “There is something in us that aspires to some kind of transcendence,” he told me back in February. “And as we’ve culturally turned from religious things, we’ve turned our transcendence to acquisition and satisfying desires.”

He says it’s not his most expensive paintings that are selling:

Media reports have lingered over the fact that some of his largest paintings — those 8 feet by 9 feet or so — can fetch $40,000 or more. But O’Connell says it’s the small works in the $1,000-$1,200 range that have been selling. And the people doing the buying, he says, come from all over the country. “What I’m struck by is this relationship to brands,” he says, noting that buyers have called to inquire about specific paintings: ” ‘Do you still have the Corn Flakes? … I want the Maxwell House.’ Whatever brand it is that they have a personal relationship with. And that, to me, is fascinating.”

Susan Orleans’ recent profile of O’Connoll touched on the company’s reaction:

[O’Connell] had never had any official communication with Walmart beyond the local managers inviting him to leave. A dealer who was interested in his work had once approached the company about acquiring one of the paintings but was told that Walmart didn’t buy art. Then, by chance, the Globe article was forwarded to Suraya Bliss, a senior director of digital strategy at the company. Bliss says that she has always been interested in visual things, and collects art herself, and she liked what O’Connell was doing. Instead of interpreting the paintings as arch commentary, she thought he was speaking to the company’s mission. “I got in touch with him and said, ‘Let’s talk and get to know each other,'” Bliss told me. After their conversation, she was convinced that his work was ‘very pure and very genuine.’ She arranged for him to take pictures in stores whenever he wanted, and offered to let him photograph from a cherry picker in one of the New Jersey superstores.

O’Connell is also working on a project, Everyartist.me, which hopes to engage millions of kids in art.

This Is Your Town On Drugs, Ctd

A reader writes:

I volunteer with the juvenile court in my county. As a result, I work with many parents who are unfortunate enough to have an opiate addiction. I also have a relative with an opiate addiction. My county is not quite as poor as Oxyana, but the demographics are much the same. As a result, we have a lot of opiate addiction here (SW Ohio) and I would say it is the number one drug problem by a large margin. Of the three articles you reference, Warren Jason Street comes the closest to depicting the reality of this problem. But, in my mind, the key quote in his article is not the one you excerpted. It is, rather:

First of all, there is a massive difference between recreational drugs and prescription drugs. In the case of Oceana, West Virginia, the difference couldn’t be more stark–doctors and pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies have profited handsomely at the expense of the citizens who were handed Oxycontin prescriptions to help them deal with “pain.” This is a case of for-profit exploitation, and a tragic one at that.

I attend continuing education conferences every year as part of my volunteer work. Last year I participated in a seminar given by a drug treatment counselor in southern Ohio. After listening to him talk about opiate addiction and what contributes to it, it’s very clear to me that certain communities are most definitely targeted by “pain” clinic operators.

They set up the pill mills to reach a certain audience, predominately poor/working-class white folks. They staff them with doctors who are ethically challenged (at best!), hang out a shingle, and then proceed to carpet the area with prescription opiates. The drug stores turn their heads and fill the prescriptions.

It’s a massive problem in Florida as well. As a matter of fact, a trip down I-75 will expose you to large billboards advertising pain clinics. My point? These folks addicted to pain killers aren’t just weak-willed hedonists who can’t stop; they have been deliberately and evilly targeted – and only Warren Jason Street seems to understand this.

It’s not clear that any of the authors you cite realize that the manufacturers of Oxycontin were fined by the FDA for deceptive marketing practices. They claimed that Oxy wasn’t addictive and marketed it to doctors that way. It’s clear that Frum doesn’t understand diddly squat about this problem. But perhaps he only objects to street drug dealers, not corporate drug dealers?

There’s much much more evil to the opiate addiction problem. I would love to see some investigative journalism that was able to tie together the collusion of the large drug companies, the large drug store chains like CVS, and the pain clinic operators. I realize that I sound like a foaming at the mouth conspiracy theorist, but I think there’s a lot more to this story than even the documentary shows.

Artistic Communion

Ben Greenman reflects on his decision to use Amy Bennett’s painting “Salute to Water Bodies” for the cover of his new book:

Many of Amy’s paintings made sense to me as extensions of my novel—or maybe it was my novel that was an extension of her paintings — but one struck me as particularly appropriate. It was a vertical painting in which a house, seen from overhead, seemed stuck precariously to its foundation, as if it might slip away at any moment. This worked as a pun, and also as a thematic echo. She identified the perspective as literary and even a bit self-deceiving: “The bird’s eye view is one I keep coming back to. In fact, I think my next series will be mostly done from that perspective. To me it’s like an omniscient narrator. It gives all of the information with a somewhat detached coolness, as if it is undisputed fact.” A little later on, she made another observation about her own work that also seemed to directly address mine: “Often it is the relationship between characters, rather than individual characters, that I am interested in depicting. …

So what does it mean for a novel and a painting to share the same interests? They exist in different kinds of spaces. They are perceived (and possessed) differently by audiences. They are forced to jump through different kinds of hoops to attain critical notice. Can they truly be fraternal twins? I had been building a case, but I started to doubt my own motives. Maybe I was trying to anchor my work in another artist’s work to keep it from disappearing — from slipping away. And yet, in the end, my time with Amy’s work, which followed close upon the heels of my time with my own, had done exactly what I hoped for: it had returned me to some of the basic questions that I had set out to explore, and then shown me that it was not possible to spend too much time inside the inquiry without bumping into another explorer. It’s not fellowship, exactly, but a strong sense of being alone together, which seems like a good way of describing the creative impulse.

The World’s Average Income

Charles Kenny asks, “What is a reasonable ‘income floor’ above which we should hope all people worldwide live?”

At the moment, we define $1.25 [a day] as extreme poverty and $2 as poverty, plain and simple. According to MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, among those living on $2 a day or less in urban areas of Tanzania, only 21 percent have a water tap in their house. In rural areas, it is less than 2 percent. The number with access to electricity is similarly dire. In rural areas, nearly one in 10 children die before their first birthday—most from easily preventable diseases. Two dollars is not nearly enough to ensure the basics of the good life.

The global median income is around $3 to $4 a day. Despite the fact that 50 percent of the population of the planet lives on less than that today, that’s still an insufficient floor. Why? In part because it’s less than the cost of a vente caramel frappuccino at Starbucks, and it seems wrong that most of the planet would subsist for a day on what many happily throw away on a caffeinated milkshake. More significantly, that level of expenditure still doesn’t guarantee people a quality of life we should all deserve.

He goes on to argue for between $10 and $15 a day.