Jeffrey Vallance Bill

LA-based artist Jeffrey Vallance is proposing the creation of a federal bill that would create a benefit fund for all living visual artists in the United States.

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The bill under discussion proposes a solution to the lack of an effective cultural policy on the federal level. It proposes a 1% tax on the sale of all art in the United States to fund a program to benefit individual artists. Annual disbursements from this fund would be paid to eligible artists living in the US. Eligibility would be awarded to those who file as visual artists on their tax forms and have evidence of an exhibition history.

Additionally, the new legislation would create an artist registry organization that would administer the annual payments. The organization would also assist with the enforcement and efficacy of resale royalty laws like the California Resale Royalties Act (Civil Code 986), which requires a 5% royalty from sales of $1,000 or more to be paid to the artist or
their estate.

The Invisible Right

"There's a great quote by the director of the Christian Coalition, who said that he wanted to be a spy. "I want to be invisible," he said, "I do guerilla warfare, I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know until election night." This is good! This is brilliant! Here the Left we should stop wearing the fucked-up T-shirts that say "Vegetarian Now." No, go to a meeting and infiltrate and then once you are inside, try to have an effect. I want to be a spy, too. I do want to be the one who resembles something else. We should have been thinking about that long ago. We have to restructure our strategies and realize that the red banner with the red raised fist didn't work in the sixties and it's not going to work now. I don't want to be the enemy anymore. The enemy is too easy to dismiss and to attack."

from interview with Felix Gonzalez-Torres by Robert Storr
ArtPress 1995 Pgs: 24 -32

Corporations more Powerful than Nations

"The UN Development program (UNDP) notes in its 1999 "Human Development Report" that many global corporations wield more economic power that nation-states. Today 50 of the largest 100 economies in the world are run my multi-national [corporations], not by countries. Mitsubishi is bigger than Saudi Arabia; General Motors is larger than Greece, Norway or South Africa. The combined annual revenue of the biggest 200 corporations are greater that those of 182 nation-states that contain 80 percent of the world's population."

From "The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization" by Wayne Ellwood

America (As Empire) As Network System

"The Demands for freedom of the seas. the promulgation of ope-door policies, and more recently, the negotiations for free trade zones always have been at the core of America's expansion around the world.
Indeed, it has been charachteristic of American [brand of] imperialism that it took territories only reluctantly, preffering to use its military might to open markets and ensure commercial advantage rather than administer foreign states.". .

From: "America as Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power?"
by Jim Garrison. pg 80

Rape and Reconciliation

Global Exhchange and Art's Symbolic Value:

". . [international] art exhibitions have taken on the meaning of recongnition and reconciliation. When the German nation put on the exhibition Documenta in Kassel in the late [post-war] 1940's, it demonstrated that it wished to acknowledge its readiness to participate once again in civilized discourse. . .in people's participation the gesture was acknowledged"

"After WWII, Austria and Japan sent exhibitions of reconciliation to America as a sign that the hostilities were over. When detente set in in the 1980's, there was no better sign of this reconciliation than the exchange of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings between the then Soviet Union and the United States."

"I think this is the bright side of something found deep in ancient human practices; namely, that the victors [in war] declare their power by taking the art of the defeated as trophies, which is a kind of cultural rape. To rob a society of its art is symbolically equivalent to violating its women. . .Agamemnon took the gold of Priam from Troy to Mycenae; in turn this booty was, in the last war, carried off by Russians from the defeated Germans. The Germans under Hitler and Goering did the same, as did Napolean, to whose wholesale confiscation of art we owe the museums of Europe: as temples for the display of artistic trophies from defeated nations. . ."

from "Art and the Discourse of Nations" by Arthur C. Danto

(Included in the collection of essays "Drawing Us In: how we experience visual art")

Virtual Ads in Television Broadcast

Disturbed to find an NBC logo and Budweiser ad in it's video backdrop of Times Square, CBS News digitally obliterated the offending images and inserted in their place a digitally generated CBS News logo on a digitally generated billboard.

The same technology is used by sports broadcasters to insert corporate logos digitally on otherwise empty soccer fields and on planels behind home plate at baseball games. It has also been used to create a virtual street bannerfor Denny's and ad logos on sidewalks for Ford and Mastercard as movie stars arrived at the Grammy Awards. An entirely new genre of "virtual advertising" is coming to supplant ad-free reality.

from "Silent Theft, the private plunder of our common wealth" b David Bollier pg. 160