Magic Mountain by Mirena Rhee

I was watching a movie about Charles Dickens. In the movie he complained about London being expensive and noisy and dirty. And then his sidekick told him - I know you always complain but London is your magic mountain isn't it?

New York City is my magic mountain, I wouldn't be the artist I'm today without New York City and its challenges. I haven't found another city willing to get down on their knees and paint on the sidewalk, elsewhere in the world people are just too skeptical.

Today I wanted to honor New York City and all its wonders - which is actually the people. The following photographs were sent to me by people who participated in memory replacement election day 2020 on Union Square.

I remember a little painter, she was probably maybe seven years old and she stayed and painted for literally 3 hours in the cold.

I wanted to say thank you.

It’s time to leave the mountain, New York will always be in my heart and i will be back and forth but I need space and time to create some stellar things.

Form fillers by Mirena Rhee

Forms They're everywhere. Form fillers That's how they get ya' Anything you want to do in life, you've gotta fill outa form. They've got forms for everything. You fill it out, 't goes up-stairs, and then they make you fill out a new form, just to confirm it was you who filled out the first form. And if you ever want to stop filling out forms, well. There's about five diff'rent forms for that..

~ from Wilderpeople

The state of the material world by Mirena Rhee

It seems to me we have learned nothing faced with the death of our society. The American Corporations continue to enslave the American public by outsourcing all jobs to other countries. They have zero interest in having educated and healthy public in the country. They have it in their best interest in having sick people becoming less and less educated by having it really expensive and have the American people work menial jobs in service industry and only crave iPhones to make useless selfies to share with the bots on Instagram.

The entertainment conglomerates having in their best interest when people stay at home do nothing get sick have less education have the best jobs outsourced to other countries for a lot less, and have the best the brightest and the entire population's attention enslaved by models and appearances on social media controlled by algorithms who make people believe that if they work hard they will be noticed when the narrative is controlled and is actually a giant shopping network so no matter what a person does they'll eventually end up not creating but shopping.

Social media is in fact the new home shopping network where people who do nothing conveniently do nothing but shop, they have nowhere to go but shop and they are clamped between made up so called holidays like Halloween Thanksgiving and Christmas which have been turned into entertaining shopping where people go from shopping for turkeys and carving pumpkins to decorating Christmas trees and spending their hard earned cash on trinkets which in turn they share on social media which of course is not social but only entrapping the minds of people into working hard to be noticed onto the platform when the platform has nothing to do with creativity and has a computer algorithm that only works to make everyone on the platform buy into it on one hand the advertisers buy ads and then the people watch the ads of course for free and shop accordingly and then they make content that only serves to support the shopping narrative. A circle of models or people who don't do anything and simply sit and take pictures of shopping potentials so it Is a vicious circle of enhanced visual shopping.

Instagram Facebook and Google are basically colluding to replace the home shopping network where instead of number if calls they announce number of likes. It's like a self-referencing shopping reality, in the meanwhile all the jobs that make people actually smarter and all the jobs that require smart people have been outsourced to poor countries where there are no threats from actual smart people.

So the only thing left to the American people and to the American graduates from education is to work manual jobs in the service industry and aspire to get iPhones so they can share and work hard, making content which in turn will sell more stuff.

I hear more and more people getting frustrated why they don't get likes as if likes is something we have to desire. I read somewhere or I heard it I forgot is that we have been continuously told that what is around us is not important that our friends that we get in touch with in person are not important and then we have to go on the website with ads to feel friendly. We have been increasingly alienated from each other in various suburbs.

We have been told that all other people are noisy obnoxious and unpleasant to be around. So we've been told that we are much better off sitting in the suburbs and driving around again isolated from everybody else but that only serves to make us depressed and seek medication and I think the loneliness and the bad food are truly the main diseases of modern American

We have been constantly told that other people are just annoying, that other human beings and not to be around too much, that other human beings are just not worth it. And the best way to be with other humans is to go online and seek their friendship in between ads, video games and other entertainment. We have been continuously told that in-person interactions are something dangerous.

Especially now with covid we were continuously being told how we have to stay at home to be protected and in fact if you stay home I'm sure you're going to get sicker in your mind and in your body without exercise without fresh air and without interaction with actual humans.

We're social beings and we need to interact with other humans, we need to be around other people to be healthy. And I think I'm not really advocating doing much about it, I'm advocating making that realization and making continuous effort to be with other humans as much as possible. We learn so much from other human beings, we don't learn anything from television shows because they always advance the narrative of the shopping networks, we learn when we read books from smart people, when we interact with smart people, when we interact with each other. This is the best way of learning continues interaction and continuous sharpening of our relationships.

But the entertainment conglomerates now have decided to divide us even further and that is the plan to conquer us, divide and conquer. First in our minds, If you have noticed the shopping networks constantly censor narratives that are supposedly against their community guidelines which is basically the shopping manual.

I wrote this at the end of 2020 with covid still fresh in my mind and left out much of the necessary punctuation on purpose. It basically has the feeling of an emotional rant and it's hard to think of punctuation when you're emotional, it's a stream of consciousness thing.

How is human art different from nature and what is special about human art? by Mirena Rhee

How is human art different from nature and what is special about human art?

It is that we can conjure, we can use our imagination. Would the Chauvet cave be the same without the art? The artist drew pictures of animals that were not in the cave, what they remembered and imagined.

We can use our imaginations to draw pictures of what is not there.

We can draw pictures of what has never been there and never will be there.

Art Test by Mirena Rhee

The real test about art is - can it be really easily reproduced?

If it can't be reproduced easily it is art that costs a lot.

It could take someone years to figure out the correct inks and paper I use.

Salvador Dali spent years trying to figure out how Vermeer painted.

Scientists actually dissect Rembrands with x-ray.

Well here's the truth, every artist has a secret ingredient they have figured out, I know I have secret ingredients for my drawings and no one else will ever be able to do anything even close to what I do. It's just a sacred combination of ideas and execution.

Same thing with Salvador Dali. His jewels will be hard to reproduce without actually looking like Salvador Dali.

My point is, there's stars exploding in the universe. There are black holes with mysteries beyond imagination, and there's art that could never be made again.