Happy New Year! Happy New Decade!
Since I launched this blog on New Year’s Eve 2010 it has been my tradition to offer a recap of the blog’s year, summarizing its stats and revisiting its most popular posts. As the decade comes to a close, I am going to do the opposite. Rather than look to the past, I look to the future, specifically, the future I imagine in the final essay of my forthcoming book, Art, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action: An Ouroboros. I decided recently to write this last essay as a work of speculative fiction in which I imagine the successful lives of three artists in the year 2050. Over the preceding three decades (starting in 2020), the United States has evolved into a social democracy akin to that of late-twentieth century Scandinavian countries, but one that sees its significant cultural and ethnic diversity as an asset and so have built on it successfully since the [hopefully] 2020 election brought the country together. I rest comfortably in retirement, knowing that there are artists who understand how to connect their work to their audiences in ways that enable them to sustain their lives. I profile three “fictional” artists:
Rey Lopez is an East LA artist and printmaker, based on an amalgamation of East LA artists and printmakers who I met in 2018 and 2019. Now in his early 60s, he maintains an active practice around community classes, political engagement, and local action. Monica Simon, age 50 sustains her artistic practice as a painter and performance artist through her membership in an artist collective, one of hundreds found throughout the country in the year 2050. Finally, Swift Z at age 30 is a media mega-star who supports both their own practice and that of others both through personal philanthropy and the restoration of the 70% marginal tax rate on wealthy Americans made possible by the election of the country’s first social democratic president.
I look forward over the next year to imagining the world inhabited by these three artists, a world in which entrepreneurial action is not driven by a desire for wealth creation but instead by a drive for social profit and cultural equity.
Have a creative, equitable, and peaceful 2020 — and beyond!
I am not a particularly observant religious Jew, but my Jewish identity is still very important to me. Chanukah is a festival holiday, one that commemorates an historical event, rather than deeply spiritual holy day like Yom Kippur or the Sabbath. When I was a teenager, my pacifist self was disturbed by the hanukiah my mother dug off a bottom shelf each year. It depicted a line of heavily armed Maccabees entering the gate of Jerusalem to save the Jews from oppression. I’m not an expert on either the history or the religion, but it is unlikely that a group of religious zealots who had been camping out in the wilderness would look this put together. Like so much of religion, this view of Judah and the Maccabees is the stuff of myth. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t something important in the Chanukah celebration, which seems more relevant now than ever before in my life.
So…I light my candles, using not my mother’s militaristic hanukiah, but this more neutral one that I bought when I was in Israel forty years ago. I light the candles to remind myself and my family that only if we work together can we resist the oppression of all people and repair the world.
