They continue to encourage guns while banning words, brushes and sleeping in art studios /  by Mirena Rhee

Here is a silly bear I found abandoned on the street one night that makes more sense than politicians.

Politics should not be politics but government that actually engages in running the country rather than making us think that there is such a thing as us versus them.

And in collusion with big tech fascism it is all Orwell predicted it to be. I grew up in such a thing and I could tell all its signs.

Banning words and suppressing dissent.

Oppression by algorithm.

Red on Orange Rages /  by Mirena Rhee

Red on Orange Rages

Red Words on Orange Paper
Ink on paper, 10.5 x 19.5 inches
June, 2023

The day after I wrote these the sky in New York City turned orange from Canadian wildfires. Right before I wrote these I was working on Mars paintings. It was kind of an orange/red irony.

We ... just had Canada gas us. I stayed at home with a gas mask. /  by Mirena Rhee

Well, yesterday I wore N95 mask inside and outside but as the day wore off I started wearing my 3M respirator that I use for painting with turpentine.

The irony is that I am working on a Mars project and it seems Mars came to me.

Was also working on a Red on Orange project and filled my Instagram with what I called Red on Orange Rages.

Epicurus /  by Mirena Rhee

Epicurus made three important innovations:

- Firstly, he decided that he would live together with friends. Enough of seeing them only now and then. He bought a modestly priced plot of land outside of Athens and built a place where he and his friends could live side by side on a permanent basis. Everyone had their rooms, and there were common areas downstairs and in the grounds. That way, the residents would always be surrounded by people who shared their outlooks, were entertaining and kind. Children were looked after in rota. Everyone ate together. One could chat in the corridors late at night. It was the world’s first proper commune.

- Secondly, everyone in the commune stopped working for other people. They accepted cuts in their income in return for being able to focus on fulfilling work. Some of Epicurus’s friends devoted themselves to farming, others to cooking, a few to making furniture and art. They had far less money, but ample intrinsic satisfaction.

- And thirdly, Epicurus and his friends devoted themselves to finding calm through rational analysis and insight. They spent periods of every day reflecting on their anxieties, improving their understanding of their psyches and mastering the great questions of philosophy.

Even today, Epicurus remains an indispensable guide to life in advanced consumer capitalist societies because advertising – on which this system is based – functions on cleverly muddling people up about what they think they need to be happy.

An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.

Adverts wouldn’t work as well as they do if they didn’t operate with an accurate sense of what our real needs are. Yet while they excite us by evoking them, they refuse to quench them properly. Beer ads will show us groups of friends hugging – but only sell us alcohol (that we might end up drinking alone). Fancy watch ads will show us high-status professionals walking purposefully to the office, but won’t know how to answer the desire for intrinsically satisfying work. And adverts for tropical beaches may titillate us with their serenity, but can’t – on their own – deliver the true calm we crave.

Epicurus invites us to change our understanding of ourselves and to alter society accordingly. We mustn’t exhaust ourselves and the planet in a race for things that wouldn’t possibly satisfy us even if we got them. We need a return to philosophy and a lot more seriousness about the business of being happy.

Clouds NYC /  by Mirena Rhee

Today's list /  by Mirena Rhee

Misinformation

Polit-think

Group-think

Trend-think

Censorship

Suppression of speech

Algorithm-think

Wrong-think

Right-think

Must-think

Kill-think

Shop-think is always ok though

Corporate-think

The machines have started selecting all the offenders

Reminds me of a certain communist dictatorship I grew up in, history repeats itself in new clothes

When they start arresting artists and people for Say Crimes

Do not let corporations shut us up for Think-crimes

Government mandated

Banned

Banned words

Shadow-banned

Words are banned but not guns

Today's list /  by Mirena Rhee

I don't subscribe to tribalism

countryism

localism

languageism

DNA-ism

I will speak whatever language I want and I'll be from whatever country I want and I will belong to whatever place I want.

MOMA = Artism on Command by Corporate Demand /  by Mirena Rhee

MOMA = Art on Command by Corporate Demand.

The Cultural Dictatorship of $Digital Corporationship. Now corporations are in charge of telling you what kind of art to make.

MOMA has stooped to a new low, this used to be an institution presenting cutting edge art. Now I see the same things that I see on social media, the AI Art BS. They all train models and make meaningless computer tomography images. It's just photoshopped somebody else's stuff, I can do it in 3 seconds on my Mac applying five Photoshop filters in a row, and then if I throw my Mac out of the window then it's going to be even more radical.

While MOMA ignored cutting edge digital works for the past 20 years. By the way we did these kind of images in video games 20 years ago. I can show you a screenshot of a video game that I made exactly 20 years ago that looks better and more timely than what I see in Norma, aka MOMA.

Art On Command, Your art has to be trained on Dogma.

It reminds me of the communist dictatorship I grew up in behind the Red Curtain.

Now we have the Digital Curtain conveniently obscuring the soulless fragmentation of our society by algorithmically commanding all our interactions.