Index:
1) Introduction
2) Art Criticism
3) Intrusive Thinking and Creativity
4) The Role of Missing Information in Creativity
5) Art and Algorithms
6) Art, A.I., and Culture
7) Autism and The World
8) YouTube Channel and Miscellaneous
The Road to Nirvana is Paved with Karaoke: This is original text from a sub-domain I create a decade ago. (This sub-domain has since perished):
Schopenhauer said that every generation believes it is the salt and summit toward which humanity has striven. The case is always strong, but clearly wrong if the next generation does not concur. Where seizing the reins of power (as well as the modes of production), we have not so much liberated the best and brightest among us as have been swallowed up by manifold vanity projects of plebeians. The New World Order of culture is Karaoke Culture; and where culture is left to its consumer to invent, one gets exactly the culture one deserves.
Autism versus Social Media: One may marvel at the amour propre required to build a website of this scale, but autism makes one naturally disposed to the occupation of publicist, whether in the service of obscure subjects (like seed drill catalogs, doorknob assembly, etc.) or in the service of one’s obscure life.
When I first started blenderkitty.com in 2002, I believed I would be part of an artistic vanguard that would take to the Internet like beatniks to a Parisian coffeehouse. Nothing like this happened. It has been said that the Internet was created by autistics for autistics, but since social media brought the cattle in from the field, God-only-knows how and where you would find autistics now.
The baseline premise for Internet success begins with being socially well connected. This status does not, generally, describe autistics. Through the coarse sieve of social media, the few are still the prisoner of the many. The Internet has changed nothing about human nature, or about how culture is promulgated through gatekeepers.
Perhaps in its early days of clutter and disorganization, the Internet was a diamond in the rough. But as things have gone along, ever-improving algorithms have sand-blasted away this roughness. The Internet has come to resemble an overly familiar strip mall: No matter what your inquiry is, you wind up in the same cramped parking lot looking at the same Office Depot and Subway sandwich shop. In desperation, you jump deep into Google’s listed pages, trying to unearth original and novel content, but the strip mall follows you wherever you go. Like a specter, or detached retina, it is inescapable in your line of sight.
Art, Real Estate, and Location: Art is like real estate. It is about location. This is the main reason why I have been invisible for most of my life as an artist. I do not live in a place where artists thrive.
While Bloomington, Indiana has (or had) a distinguished school of art, local artists are generally less distinguished. There is the obligatory watercolor society, and the recent addition of a plein-air society, which includes former students of mine. However, contemporary painters, such as one finds in large cities, number few. I can only think of one, actually. I have known illustrators who have earned their money out of town, but Bloomington is not large enough or wealthy enough to support artists who can make money selling paintings of scale or ambition.*
Many cities have given artists unused post-industrial buildings to convert into artists studios and galleries, but the one good building of that type here was claimed by city hall for its uses. The one dinky building that was given to artists did not last long. I can only guess as to why. I suspect that it became a hangout for skateboarders or drug hook ups. Perhaps the building attracted youth who wanted a clubhouse, and so, working artists, were there any, probably gave up on the idea of going to this location and getting work done.
An artist workplace requires a serious mission statement, a critical mass of like-minded artists, and locks on the doors to keep out thieves and riffraff.
(*Where there is local funding for “emerging artists” in my town, it is the usual sort of high brow, politically well-connected claptrap that one finds perpetually paraded by the discredited National Endowment for The Arts. Bloomington fancies itself as a culturally relevant city, and so it also gloms onto these pretenses.
One of my students was the director of The Arts Alliance in Bloomington, and he showed me images of last year’s winners in a local arts funding scheme. He shared my mystification for why art of such obviously inferior ability should be praised.)
A Club that would have Me as a Member: Someone tried to recruit me into this local clubhouse scheme, but as I describe in my comic pages, I am a creature of coffeehouse society. I am not a joiner but, instead, a person who would rather watch others from a respectable distance.
A professor from IU also tried to rope me into some participatory project after I graduated in 1988. He meant well, seeing me as someone who failed to get a teaching gig after grad school. Perhaps local society would give me structure. He was frustrated to find me reluctant to give up my cartooning evenings at The Runcible Spoon.
If there is any attribute that separates autistic creators from non-autistic creators, then it lies in the Achilles heel of the social dimension. Non-autistic creators value community often to their detriment. They become distracted by squabbling, pecking order among members, and all the difficulties one may imagine arising from family life. More so, non-autistic creators budget a lot of time for such things. They appear, from an autistic view, to lack the ability to concentrate and, necessarily, the drive to be both selfish and self-reliant.
In framing the condition that came to bear his name, Hans Asperger stated that perhaps only certain autistic individuals were capable of unique achievements.
I would describe autistics as being undistracted; and because of this, social media havens are not good fits.
Yes, groups have benefits: words of encouragement, friendship, and career opportunities through interpersonal relationships, etc… But that is a difficult needle to thread.
A Defense of Dali’s Eccentricity: I recently tried to watch a video by a YouTube creator who labelled Salvador Dali as a fascist because of 1) his ambivalence towards accursed political groups; and 2) his attraction to accursed political groups’ symbology as a visual language. A third reason lies in his support of Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
First, Dali had Aspergers—I am certain. His attraction to putting cameos of Hitler in his morally ambiguous paintings synchs with his descriptions of symbology in art. Many people privately admired (or tolerated) Hitler prior to his invasion of Poland, including playwright G. B. Shaw, the most famous socialist of his day. Dali was not unusual in this. To accuse Dali of being a Nazi sympathizer is like accusing pop surrealist Mark Ryden of being a closet republican because he puts so many Abraham Lincolns in his paintings. Moreover, Dali dropped images of Lenin into his paintings, also. Do these depictions spare him the vitriol of secondhand slander by moralizing leftists?
Moralism, as a litmus test for good art, is about as useless as the intellectual claptrap modernists parade in public to defend third-rate talent. Such artists are copyists and confidence tricksters. Word salads only impressed weak minds and high brow revolutionaries. Geniuses of the calibre of a Dali or a Einstein are visual thinkers.
This same YouTuber praises Picasso’s Guerica as a call of arms against fascism, without addressing the fact that there were atrocities committed on both sides of the Spanish Civil War—by fascists, communists, and republicans alike. It was a war that divided a country, even to today. Franco is depicted as a villain in Western media, but he still has his supporters in Spain, so make of that what you will.
Dali was an oppositional thinker. Adopting a different political side than other artists requires intellectual energy to defend your views, especially since the views embraced by most artists, though morally proper for that crowd, are a lazier kind of thinking: Everyone already agrees with you! More to the point, it is doubtful Dali ranked any of his colorful opinions, even where he contradicted himself on principle.
Guernica by Pablo Picasso
As a call to arms, Guerica was rather esoteric. I doubt many who suffered in Guerica could identify their suffering in Picasso’s abstract-figurative painting. The YouTuber points out how Dali’s admiration of Picasso was a one-way street, as if Dali deserved no respect from the greater artist. History has been less than kind to this view. Picasso fades into a backdrop of Modernist stylists while Dali continues to be a rock star.
Picasso is like Charlie Chaplin. His reputation as the exemplary genius of his age is the relic of a bygone mindset, where this mindset was informed by what immediately preceded it as culture. In losing this context, we are left with only the art to consider. Laurel and Hardy have dated better than Chaplin; and Dali was a better painterly craftsmen and imagineer than Picasso.
Interestingly, Robert Hughes, the most famous art critic of his day, regarded Dali’s graphic Soft Construction with Boilers Beans [A Premonition of Civil War] as being the greatest antiwar painting ever painted—not Guerica.
Soft Construction with Boilers Beans (A Premonition of Civil War) by Salvador Dali
It is telling that this YouTube creator highlights how fellow surrealists, who prided themselves on being communists, tried Dali for his thought crimes and Hitler fixation. A show trial is such a Stalinist thing to do, so it seems fitting that both the surrealists and the YouTube creator should set store by it. If one is looking for fascists to put on trial in absentia, then the Italian Futurists much admired Mussolini in the early going of that dictator’s career. It is no surprise that surrealism went the way of Stalinism after the war. People had had their fill of strident opinions.
Dali eventually parted company with the surrealists; and yet… why did he suffer their intolerance for as long as he did? I suspect autism played a role here, too.
Luis Buñuel, who collaborated with Dali on the surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou, told the story how Dali was incapable of managing bus stops, and once required his assistance to catch a bus. Dali was probably frightened and confused by unknown situations. He likely saw his fellow surrealists as a family, and feared facing the world without the security they provided through their camaraderie. (He need not had worried.)
I am reminded of what Gala said about the surrealists. She slept through most of them, and stuck with Dali because, “he was the one with all the talent.”
Original animated gif from my original website.
Hacked Twice, but Undefeated: If you attempted a Google search for “Michael Teague” or “Blender Kitty” in recent years, then you were unable to find my site. Unbeknownst to me, the .htaccess file in my root directory got hacked around 2018. This effectively made my website invisible to search engines. So complete was my eradication from the Internet that, unless you typed in the FULL ADDRESS of my website into your browser window, you could not make it appear in any search. Initially, queries were directed away from my site to a malicious site, but after this pirate ship was scuttled, I was effectively memory-holed.
To be clear, blenderkitty.com, which became mlteague.com, was not itself hacked, only my .htaccess file was hacked by the insertion of special redirection instructions for search engines. I acquired my SSL certificate somewhere around 2018. However, added security would not have caught this.
My website disappeared off my radar screen during this four year window. I got no web traffic, and I was dealing with demons in my personal life. I discovered the hack recently while trying to submit a new sitemap to Goggle Search Console in March 2022 and was told, by them, that my site did not exist. The query produced only “404 page not found” error messages because the malicious site had long since disappeared—if not its redirect in my root folder!
Host Gator was unhelpful when I told them I thought my .htaccess file was hacked. They sent me to a SEO (Search Engine Optimizer), who told me my site was crap and to pay him $1,000. After I rewrote my .htaccess, and deleted every inscrutable file in my root folder that was not placed there by me, Google could again see my site—and I did not have to pay $1,000 for that.
Google Streetview: Several years ago I was walking home from the coffee house when Google Streetview drove up beside me and snapped a picture. I was traveling uphill on 4th Street, almost to the gated entrance of Rosehill Cemetery, which I always cut through when I walked to class at The Waldron Art Center. I never thought to look for myself on Google Earth until months later. Lo and behold, there I was, with laptop in tow, and in considerably warmer weather than was presently had. This was apropos, since I had numerous places of dark interest pinned on Google Earth. And here I am within a half-block of a cemetery(!): 39°09'56.07" N 86°32'35.13" W
This is one of two sets of Google Streetviews of myself. There was another, closer to my apartment, but that one was removed from Google Earth before it could be copied. The unlikelihood of being captured twice by Google Streetview comes up as a topic of conversation in my new novel.
The Vivien Leigh Bedroom 1977-1980: My libido arrived at a normal age, and there it resided until my late teens when adulthood beckoned with a need to objectify these untapped energies.
While working at McDonalds in 1977, I saw Gone With The Wind for the first time and was smitten with its star, Vivien Leigh. My obsession for her blossomed over the next year, and coincided with my discovery of Tchaikovsky and The Romantic Composers.
The first of my many handmade Vivien Leigh posters was a modest portrait with a stark yellow background (seen in the middle of the fourth picture). The poster board was cheap, and color was added to it by rubbing oil paint over a finished graphite drawing. Other painted drawings of this period survive in dusty chapbooks, while all my posters were lost to time. Decorating my room with Vivien Leigh images may have persisted as late as 1981. It was ended by the time I started my BFA degree in fine art. This obsession is explained in my online novel, Icarus Transfigured.
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