This collage piece was made the old fashion way–with magazines, a pair of scissors, some tape, and a human mind. My favorite collage artist, Jess Collins, set the standard (in my opinion) for this type of art because of talent, obviously, but ALSO because Jess was involved with the project of violently dismantling the old world in order to help reassemble the new, atomic one.
Jess was born Burgess Franklin Collins in Long Beach, California. He was drafted into the military and worked on the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project. After his discharge in 1946, Jess worked at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington, and painted in his spare time, but his dismay at the threat of atomic weapons led him to abandon his scientific career and focus on his art.
In 1949, Jess enrolled in the California School of the Arts (subsequently the San Francisco Art Institute) where he studied under Clyfford Still, David Park, Hassel Smith, and Edward Corbett. He received a BFA degree in 1951. in 1949 he broke with his family, and thereafter referred to himself simply as “Jess.”
Jess’ piece, pictured above, is a nice illustration of how art/mind control functions. You, cowboy, are immediately drawn to the captivating eyes of the mountain lion…but who notices the eye of Horus near the mountain peak? And, even if noticed, who understands that the eye of Horus could be a symbolic reference to the pineal gland?
Now that we’ve entered the New Age of Digital WhoreUs, the prospects for artists has never been bleaker. Take the story of folk musician, Murphy Campbell, as a disturbing and cautionary example:
Folk musician Murphy Campbell just became the latest victim in AI’s Wild West. In January, she discovered songs on her Spotify profile that she never uploaded – AI-generated covers of her own performances, scraped from YouTube and uploaded under her name without permission. The incident exposes a growing crisis where independent artists face both AI voice cloning fraud and a copyright system too broken to protect them, raising urgent questions about platform accountability in the age of generative AI.
Accountability? With how much AI slop now “floods the zone”, accountability for folk artists might not rate high in navigating the hellscape of cognitive triage necessary to wade through all the garbage we are faced with on a daily, hourly basis.
If you follow any Boomers on Facebook you will see the resulting cognitive damage of what’s happening with online content, since they are easy targets for this online slop-rot. Here’s an example I got a tip about this morning while trying to figure out what to write about today:
The irony that Foruk, Abdur, and that third one is helping to slop humans in Missoula with DATA CENTER BAD outrage while I, the unpaid citizen blog-flogger, gets increasingly restrained from WHERE I CAN GO and WHO I AM ALLOWED TO WRITE ABOUT, isn’t lost on me.
It’s also ironic that the kind of Boomers outraged by DATA CENTERS are also using FB to write accurate, yet useless, commentary on local decision-making processes regarding the same tax mechanism I made myself a local target for years ago when I accurately called out the Missoula Redevelopment Agency in a documentary I self-financed and released to the Missoula public for free.
Well, John, you had me until AND VOTE FOR LEADERS…because you obviously don’t understand how much happens before “leaders” emerge on the scene as options. It’s kind of like expecting these people to be supporters of art that challenges institutional power:
Is there an alternative to becoming a retarded local with impotent outrage expressed on the digital platforms fueled by the infrastructure they think they are fighting? Sure, I’d say give money to a LESS RETARDED whistleblowing local Lego master with a deep historical perspective, but I’m not sure I’m legally allowed to solicit donations at this point, so instead I’ll just close by saying…
Thanks for reading!
