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Trends and allegations

Imagine a can opener an economy driven by consumption:

AI fears came roaring back, with Nasdaq futures pointing to a reversal of yesterday’s gains in tech shares. Data-center company Elice saw its stock plunge 32% on its trading debut in Seoul, underscoring the worries about whether the AI boom can justify the billions being poured into the industry. Attention in the tech world now turns to Netflix, which is due to report earnings today. The streaming giant is under pressure to show it can produce hit movies and TV series again after a recent drought.

From the daily Bloomberg email a couple of days ago– again, only the messenger – but the shell game on display in the pivot presents a mid-stream snapshot of the shell game very much in progress. The crowding out of housing, retail, public infrastructure, education, healthcare… any other sector, in favor of hyperscaler AI build out that shows very little demand but on which the stock and bond markets are tied like pretty ladies to the track, quickly gives way to pressure/hopes for another fount of leprechaun gold. What’s that sound? Oh, not to worry – that’s way over there in France:

Four years after the invasion of Ukraine, France is the European country that has bought the most Russian liquid natural  gas since the beginning of 2026.

The threats are piling up between Moscow and Brussels, but our money continues to cross the border. We’re financing the two camps of the same war.

That money going to Russia and the Gulf states doesn’t stay in our country to renovate schools and support the most disadvantaged.

Basically, the high cost of living that filled the streets on Saturday is, first and foremost, a deep-seated divide.

My translation of an IG post from yesterday. Added note on a weird-ish development: I’ve been following the protests in France only through social media – videos, writing, and narration from individuals on the ground, in the street, commenting on the government’s response, as opposed to any American or British media outlets. It’s just a thing I noticed myself doing, and requires added vigilance to read/listen to subtext and signals from these unknown (to me) interlocutors. As the far right tries to assert itself in the chaos, posts are potentially potential mis- or disinformation, so you have to read all the way to end, and think about how you’re being to told what, and who is being blamed. In an otherwise little-noticed development, the onus falls on me to figure out whether I am being manipulated.

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More Hughes you can Use

I had another work dialed up for today, but I’m not quite finished with it. So, in lieu, here’s some more Robert Hughes we can always all use. Consider the fact that it comes from the 9/10/01 issue of Time a sort of time-encapsulated bonus.

When Americans interested in art are asked what they have heard of from South America, the answer tends to be pretty much the same: two dead Mexicans and one live Colombian. The Mexicans are, of course, Diego Rivera, a great artist by any standard, and his wife Frida Kahlo, not a great painter by any reasonable judgment, but a tough and gifted woman who, owing to her hagiographic suffering (not to mention being ardently collected by the likes of Madonna), has become Exhibit A, by now somewhere above Artemisia Gentileschi in the pantheon of feminist art-saints. The live Colombian is probably the richest artist alive, the unbearably repetitious and banal Fernando Botero, 69, who has made millions, millions and millions of dollars painting and sculpting mountainously fat people over and over and over again. These sleek, bloated lumps of cellulite have the same appeal to the international nouveau riche that the semi-skeletal poor of Picasso’s Blue Period used to.

Clearly, that can’t be the whole story from the vast continent, and Harvard’s Fogg Museum is filling in at least some of the gaps with a show of its diametric opposite: geometric abstraction, drawn from a distinguished and systematic collection made by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, who lives in Caracas, Venezuela, and is an ardent evangelist for South American abstract painters and sculptors. Cisneros has a severe and finely tuned eye, and her collection is remarkably free from nationalist bias. This is a very catholic collection. Of course, some of the artists in it, such as the Venezuelan Jesus Rafael Soto, 78, have exhibited quite often in the U.S. But most of them are not all that familiar, and the show makes a strong case that some of them–including Brazil’s Helio Oiticica (1937-1980) and Lygia Clark (1920-1988), Venezuela’s Gertrude Goldschmidt (1912-1994, a sculptor who worked under the name of Gego) and Carlos Cruz-Diez, 78, and of course that long-dead Uruguayan father figure of South American abstraction, Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874-1949)–emphatically ought to be.

There are practically no generalizations to be made that hold true across the whole spectrum of art activity in South America. How could there be? The histories of the countries that constitute it are so totally different, especially in the 20th century. What could a country like Argentina, long ruled by a semi-fascist dictator like Peron, intensely conservative in its cultural orientation, have in common with a long-running, more or less liberal democracy like Venezuela’s? In the real world there is no unified entity called South America. What this show presents is not some fiction of a general cultural ethos but rather the work of a number of talents underknown by norteamericanos, some of whom have some things in common.

The rest at the link.