Modern Art Museums

I was at the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art today and I think it was slightly better than Seattle’s (which I visited in April), by which I meant the collection was only like 95% shit instead of 98% shit. The very cursed conclusion might be that its better because of increased competition amongst billionaires, since the one in Seattle was very inside this one billionaire couple’s ass for being like 50% of their endowment.

Anyways, with that experience super fresh in my mind I thought it could be nice to collect my thoughts on modern art museums and how to have fun in them, and maybe do a little photo essay of SF MoMA’s highlights and lowlights.

Things that modern art could make you feel:

  • Like you’re complicit in a billionaire’s tax evasion scheme. This is a collection that was made in like 2007 or something, which is like 60 years after people already thoroughly explored every variation of DrAwInG aTtEnTiOn tO tHe MeDiUm and made every thoughtful piece you can make about that.
If your Drawing Attention To The Medium art piece is worse than Rauschenberg’s White Painting, which was done in the freaking 50s (also available for viewing at SFMOMA!!!) DONT even talk to me, dont even look in my direction
  • The “my 5 year old can draw that” indignation, which you can feel even if you don’t have a 5 year old. Most of the time you’re right to feel indignant; like I said most modern art is garbage. HOWEVER, if you’re looking to decorate your apartment, the good news is, you can take pics of those pieces as inspiration if you like their vibe and then let your inner 5 year old go ham. I think Basquiat has the scribble game locked down too tight so I’m not too interested in making worse scribbly things myself when I can just get prints of his works. Here’s a cool one tho. Something about making some cool thing using math and randomness, but cheating a little so that it looks not entirely shit. Sure I can paint something like that why not
“256 Farben”, Gerhard Richter, 1974. From the slightly confusing placard description, I think what he did was randomly choose the intensity of the three primary colours plus green, for each square, and then mix the colours and paint a rectangle. The green helps make the painting a little more cohesive in colour, and I’m definitely sure he didn’t use true randomness because too many of these shades are vibrant instead of muddy. I’m on to you, Gerhard. But yea I can do something like this to cover up a big bland wall in my apartment
  • Sometimes you see a real piece by someone you’re expecting to be impressed by since it’s a Big Name and it’s just kinda lame
“Cronos”, Noguchi, 1947. Why is this guy considered visionary again?? Idk maybe it was cool for 1947
  • Other times pieces do actually live up to the hype if you see them in person. I did not expect to be so moved by Rothko, but at SF I saw my second Rothko piece and the experience was as weird and sublime as the first. I didn’t take a pic because it’s really much a deal of You Need to See Them in Person and Have Them Loom Over You Like A Cloud of Emotion, and the emotion felt too sacred to try to capture in a camera lens.
  • Can make you feel unexpected emotions, unintentionally. Here is a gallery description introducing you to the works of Günther Förg, whose works I enjoyed.
What struck me about this is that we will never, ever be able to use lead as a medium like this ever again – purely for its material properties, with no regard to the harm that they pose. Even if someone chooses to use lead like this they’ll be forced to like comment on the implications of the health risks of the medium, or deliberately not comment on it – you are no longer able to be neutral about it. The gallery itself mediated the experience of viewing the works in an unintentional way as well. Most placards around the museum had small, unintrusive “don’t touch!” icons that were easy to dismiss. The placards in this gallery said, in angry bold text, something like “no seriously do not touch these paintings, they will bring serious harm to your body and your children”. Unexpected frisson there for sure! Maybe you can even say that it is a commentary on the power of art :y
  • Can make you feel unexpected emotions, intentionally, and possibly even grant you superpowers for a bit. I do have a pic for this one but it’s another example of something you need to see in person to understand.
“IKB 174”, Yves Klein, 1958. Before there was vantablack and the pinkest pink, this guy named Yves Klein invented a supersaturated blue pigment and became obsessed with it. All of his works use it, and he patented it as “International Klein Blue” (IKB). Having never seen IKB pieces in person, I kind of wrote it off as a gimmick, but it turns out that IKB is without a doubt the most beautiful colour that I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. The screens and photos will never do it justice. The paint was thick, pastelly and a little gritty, and you can see bumps of it on the canvas. The shadow that they cast was a subtle and beautiful purple, instead of a more shaded blue, which delighted and shocked me. After noticing this, for the rest of the day, my eyes were a thousand times more sensitive to the shade that various colours turned when they were partially enshadowed, and that lead to a dozen more moments of awe. thank u yves klein i owe u my life

Things to keep in mind as you go through the exhibits:

  • It’s different than a classical art museum, because so many more things fall under modern art – weird sculpture, multimedia pieces, performance art, etc, and also a lot of the pieces come from newer artists that haven’t been time tested yet. I think this leads to a wider spread in quality: there are more pieces that are sublime, and more that are pretty trash. At a normal art museum you just look at paintings and feel slight emotions sometimes, it’s a much more reserved affair. You’re probably not going to find a piece that makes you feel like you’ve been punched in the gut or that teaches you to look at the world in a brand new light.
  • Some artists really phone it in sometimes and it shows. And again, a lot of the pieces are at the museum because of like, tax writeoff shenanigans. These come in the form of something like:
    • Rich person buys art off a guy for 5k
    • Rich person gets art appraised and now the art is worth 30k because the artist is very popular in the new york art scene or whatever
    • Rich person donates art as an in-kind donation worth 30k and can write that off on their taxes.
  • Relatedly, you should feel extra ok about trusting your own analysis on modern art – we haven’t settled on whether or not any particular artist is good, the way we’ve settled on like, classical artists. (All the classical artists you know are “good”, the rest are lost to history or obscurity) And again, most of them are scams, so don’t feel the need to be like “I don’t get it probably because I don’t know enough art history” when you think a piece is really dumb.
  • Hell, most modern artists don’t know their art history. I know this is the case because the museums will very gladly and gleefully point it out to you each time when someone actually knows their art history and does something clever with it. Their pieces are definitely a lot cooler, but they’re definitely the exceptions more than the rule.

If you are an art person and pissed off about any of what I wrote, please invite me to go to a modern art museum with you so you can explain art to me! <3

Donations, The First Year

2021 was my first year with a full-time, steady source of employment, and money that accumulates instead of going right back into tuition and living expenses.

Having identified as an Effective Altruist (EA)1 for the better part of a decade, one thing I was looking to the most from this was the ability to finally make a substantial difference through the unit of caring.

For someone who’s identified as an Effective Altruist for the better part of a decade though, it was embarrassingly easy for sentiment to get my goat.

😓😓😓

Where We Gave

My girlfriend and I donated ~10% of our combined post-tax income, as stipulated by the Giving What We Can pledge. However, we failed to donate it all to effective charities, so it can’t really be said that we uh actually fulfilled the terms of the pledge. Thankfully I am very neurotic about not breaking any oaths so I have prepared for this moment by never actually officially signing up for the pledge, despite having identified as an effective altruist for zzzzzzz.

Here is where it went:

40% to global health initiatives via the RCForward Global Health Fund.2

15% to environmental advocacy via the RCForward Climate Change Fund.

15% to Spectrum, Kitchener-Waterloo’s queer community space. They do a lot of cool stuff and maintain a very active calendar of events.

15% to A Better Tent City, a cheap, no-barrier alternative to shelters in Kitchener. Instead of doing the shelter model where they turn everyone out during the day and then accept them back at night using a first-come-first serve basis (which is bad since demand outnumbers supply so there’s no sense of security for any shelter users), ABTC serves a more permanent community by giving them tiny homes to live in.

15% to the KWCF Immigration Partnership Fund for Immigrant and Refugee Initiatives, to support programs and initiatives for Afghan refugees starting their new life in Waterloo Region.

On Donating Locally

To be honest, I’m still not really sure if doing what was basically a 50/50 split between effective and local charities was the right move. It’s definitely something I want to think through in more detail before this year’s donations.

What we donated to local charities combined would be enough to save the lives of like two children if we donated it to a Givewell recommended global health charity, and I wouldn’t expect it to have that sort of impact here – although I think the value to local donations might be higher than you’d expect. I might write a post about this later.

I think you can definitely argue that donating to local charities could be put in the same bucket as, like, signing up for local pottery classes (some fun, some stimulation of the local economy), or heck maybe even home decor (beautifying your immediate area entirely for your own benefit) – something you do for warm fuzzies more than you do because it’s the right thing to do.

On the other hand, I do think that having a sense of rootedness in where you live is virtuous (and a pretty big force multiplier in doing stuff that’s good), and I genuinely do think that local charities are neglected and can be very powerful.

Getting My Goat

Stuff about local/effective donations aside, I think my local charities were honestly pretty terribly chosen and motivated entirely by my lame monkey emotions. Spectrum because I’m gay and I attended some events that they hosted, and I had a really good time. ABTC because I work with people who are on the project and it seems cool. The refugee fund because I was following their story in local papers and they did a good job tugging on my heartstrings.

I mean look I did look into everyone’s annual reports and make sure that they’re legit, and in the case of the refugees I ended up donating to my second choice since the first was literally in the middle of a money laundering scandal, but I basically made up the categories out of whole cloth since I didn’t have a super rigorous idea of what I wanted to do.

I also didn’t donate to what I think is equivocally the best and also most neglected charity in the region, because I thought it would be awkward since I work there (I work there because I researched nonprofits in the region to apply to jobs at and this seemed like very obviously the best one), which is honestly a pretty terrible reason. Especially since it’s actually very easy to donate anonymously, but to be fair I only realized this after we did all our donations.

I will state though for the record that the donor wall didn’t actually factor into my decision making process at all. That was just a joke I swear.

Tentative Plan for 2022

Aggressive/Risky: Donate 10% of income to effective charities in global health and environmental advocacy, in something like a 70/30 split. Definitely pay attention to new environmental projects. Treat local donations as a separate budget category that pulls from our spending money, and donate only to the one I like. Executing this means risking not doing any local donations.

Moderate/Safe: Donate 10% of income in a 70/20/10 split for global health, environmental advocacy, and local organizations respectively. I think this is what I actually want to do, rationally, monkey emotions aside. Peter Singer still wouldn’t Officially Recognize Me As A Good Person if I go this route, but I think about this in terms of harm reduction – the more I enjoy the giving process, the more likely I am going to do continue to do it in following years. Ensuring that the experience of donating remains pleasant for me is how I ensure that the world gets donations from me for the rest of my life, and if that means local charities get a cut, it’s still better than if my monkey emotions start rioting and I stop donating in 5 years when my earning power is higher.

  1. If you’ve never heard of Effective Altruism before, I recommend this introduction.[↩]
  2. As a Canadian, RCForward is the only solution I’ve found to donate to many Givewell approved charities and still get tax receipts.[↩]

Ways a phone is like a dæmon

With apologies to Philip Pullman.

  • It’s an extension of me – my phone and I are part of the same entity that make up my thoughts/perspectives/habits
  • Despite the fact that it’s part of me, I can still “talk” to it (i.e. get new insights and perspectives from it through interacting with it)- it’s a part of my soul, but separate enough for that
  • Everyone has one that is close by them at all times, and our structures are now built to accommodate them (charging ports at malls! QR code menus at restaurants!)
  • If mine is more than 6 ft away from me I get separation anxiety
  • If I am to be permanently separated from a smartphone I will probably end up catatonic with depression for life (this one is maybe a joek)
  • I can talk to another person in person, and I can use my phone to communicate to their phone, but using another person’s phone seems viscerally wrong/taboo – I would never pick up a random phone and start playing around with it at a party. Strange phones emit a strong Do Not Touch field. I would even hesitate to move a strange phone from a couch to a table to sit on the couch.
  • It feels slightly less wrong when it’s a close friend or lover, but it still feels like an invasion of privacy (touching another person’s daemon is reserved for basically only immediate family and lovers, and even so, very rarely)
  • One wrong interaction with someone else’s phone can destroy your relationship with them entirely
  • I did the most intimate thing I could do with my girlfriend recently – we exchanged phone PINs, and all our login info for all of our accounts. We now own a piece of each other’s souls.

Thoughts brought to you by the fact that a close friend of mine borrowed my phone to call their grandma 2 weeks ago since their phone died; I felt many unexpectedly strong emotions about this.

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