Adbusters Magazine

Who are the patrons of contemporary art today? by Andrea Fraser From Adbusters #100: Are We Happy Yet? .artBox { float:right; margin:8px 0 8px 8px; width:250px; text-align:center; color: #333; } .artBox img { width:250px; } .artBox p { margin: 2px; } .artBox .price { color: #000; font-size: 110%; font-weight: bold; } Who are the patrons of contemporary art today? The ARTnews 200 Top Collectors list is an obvious place to start. Near the top of the alphabetical list is Roman Abramovich, estimated by Forbes to be worth $13.4 billion. He has admitted to paying billions in bribes for control of Russian oil and aluminum assets. Bernard Arnault, listed by Forbes as the fourth richest man in the world with $41 billion, controls the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, which, despite the debt crisis, reported a sales growth of 13 percent in the first half of 2011. Hedge fund manager John Arnold, who got his start at Enron–where he received an $8 million bonus just before it collapsed–recently gave... - Adbusters Magazine

Planning for the apocalypse. by Christian Parenti From Adbusters #100: Are We Happy Yet? STEVEN MEISEL / VOGUE ITALIA Climate change is happening faster than initially predicted, and its impacts are already upon us in the form of more extreme weather events, desertification, ocean acidification, melting glaciers and incrementally rising sea levels. The scientists who construct the computer models that analyze climate data believe that even if we stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, CO2 levels are already so high that we are locked into a significant increase in global temperatures. Disruptive climate change is a certainty even if we make the economic shift away from fossil fuels. Incipient climate change is already starting to express itself in the realm of politics. Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis. The current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. I call this collision of... - Adbusters Magazine

David Graeber responds to Chris Hedges. From Adbusters Blog David Graeber has been involved with Occupy Wall Street since the early days of September, when he partook in the first ad hoc general assemblies in New York City and helped articulate the movements' nonviolent ethos. He is also a self-professed anarchist and Black Bloc supporter. In response to Chris Hedges Feb 6 article on Truthdig.com, The Cancer in Occupy, Graeber drafted the following open letter challenging the Pulitzer Prize winning authors’ characterization of the Black Bloc and the movement itself. I am writing this on the premise that you are a well-meaning person who wishes Occupy Wall Street to succeed. I am also writing as someone who was deeply involved in the early stages of planning Occupy in New York. I am also an anarchist who has participated in many Black Blocs. While I have never personally engaged in acts of property destruction, I have on more than one occasion taken part in Blocs where property damage... - Adbusters Magazine

Violence or nonviolence: where do you draw the line? From Adbusters Blog On Feb 6, America author and Occupy activist Chris Hedges wrote a piece for Truthdig.com titled “The Cancer in Occupy.” In it he criticized the violent actions of Black Bloc operatives within the movement, saying they are the greatest threat to the future of Occupy. The article has generated a heated debate online about non-violence, political strategy and protest in America, and has garnered a response by Anarchist thinker Dr. Zakk Flash. Read both articles and weigh-in. The Cancer in Occupy by Chris Hedges The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various... - Adbusters Magazine

Reimagining old ways of life and death. by Dustin Craun From Adbusters #100: Are We Happy Yet? XAVIER LE ROY The philosophical and spiritual problems of our age are so great that what our time calls for are new manifestos of knowledge and being. We need a kind of spiritual change that exceeds the political. Unfortunately most of us in the Westernized world spend more time trying to escape from ourselves (sex, shopping, addiction, fashion, entertainment, success), than we ever spend reflecting on the state of our existence, our heart or our soul. We are people driven by our desires: desires which destroy our hearts and any ability to have a connection to the greater spiritual realities that are all around us. As the Qur’an says, “God does not change the condition of a people, until they change their own condition.” In the classic decolonial manifesto, Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire described Western life as a poison infecting the planet. Césaire wrote that to understand our... - Adbusters Magazine

The battle has just begun. by Hakim Bey From Adbusters #98: American Autumn CARLOS VERA/REUTERS The rat-bastard Capitalist scum who are telling you to “reach out and touch someone” with a telephone or “be there!” (where? Alone in front of a goddam television??) — these lovecrafty suckers are trying to turn you into a scrunched-up blood-drained pathetic crippled little cog in the death-machine of the human soul (and lets not have any theological quibbles about what we mean by “soul”!). Fight them by meeting with friends, not to consume or produce, but to enjoy friendship and you will have triumphed (at least for a moment) over the most pernicious conspiracy in EuroAmerican society today — the conspiracy to turn you into a living corpse galvanized by prosthesis and the terror of scarcity … … to turn you into a spook haunting your own brain. - Adbusters Magazine

Autonomous action and the fracturing of consensus. From Blackspot Blog Three days after Adbusters put out a call to #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month during the May G8/NATO summits, spectacular clashes erupted between #OCCUPYOAKLAND militants and armored police. Attempts to occupy an abandoned building were put down with tear gas, less-lethal munitions and baton charges. What was new, and surprising, this time around was that some Oakland occupiers came equipped as altermodern Hoplites with plastic and tin shields. And to everyone’s amazement they performed an eerie quasi-military discipline and phalanx formation that had clearly been worked out beforehand. They came ready and willing to confront police. On a symbolic level, the Oakland street battle struck a chord in the movement because its theatrical staging functioned as an inverted repetition of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests that electrified the first phase of Occupy. In both cases, a group of protesters engaged in the ostensibly illegal... - Adbusters Magazine