hat has happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave in four short years? Alexis de Toqueville’s famous tyranny of the masses has morphed into a television-fueled nightmare on Main Street. EVERYTHING is super-sized, not just the state’s repressive apparatus and the Bush regime’s oligopoly. FOX News, the Republican propaganda arm, reaches into the far corners of the country 24/7/365 and is slowly poisoning the American mind. This is racism for the masses, a primitive fear of the other made public policy. It’s a machine for the installation of low-grade perpetual war. The Cold War has become the Culture War. Where is Joseph Beuys when we need him? “To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom.” Beuys liked America (and America liked him), but he wasn’t going to take any bullshit from it. Today, watching videos of his actions reminds us that art used to matter. Just look at him at his blackboard at the Tate in London, covered in chalk dust, earnestly discoursing about politics and art with anyone who wandered in. He actually believed that an artist could transform the world, change the course of history, bring down a government. In the U.S.A., the only people who believe that today are born-again evangelists. Someone has locked the ghost of Joseph Beuys in a very dark place. Freud thought that people love tyranny for the same reason that they love intoxicants and sex: temporary relief from cognitive dissonance. The dissonance provoked by the crises of globalization has given the US government enormous powers to establish control which daily diminish individual freedom. Afterart News believes that artists matter more than ever today if only because, for most of us, cognitive dissonance is our modus operandi. But we also know that if art is to be more than a pleasurable pastime for the rich or a barnacle on the underbelly of mass culture, then artists, collectors, curators and culture vultures of all stripes must be political (whatever their art may be). The freedom of our science is at stake. Beuys’s blackboards have become our flat screens. Let the presses roll.
Richard Dailey, Paris.

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