Elegy
This morning as I sat down with my coffee and the newspaper, ready to take in the latest installment in the dismantling of our capitalist system, I was particularly struck by what I saw on the front page of the business section of The New York Times. Above the fold, the panoramic image of unsold vehicles at a California port was beautiful and sad, something I might have painted when I was in my early 20s. The headlines complimented the despairing mood: “A Sea of Unwanted Imports”, “Piling Up Monuments of Waste” and “Treasury Denounced Over Bailout”. But what really struck me, below the fold, was a picture of an abandoned Circuit City. This might be one of the hundreds of big-box stores I’ve photographed over the years. Those red stripes could have made their way into my monument to consumption, Convergence (2000-1).
Lately it’s occurred to me that the world my paintings have been about all these years is crashing down before our very eyes. If my work was ahead of the curve over the last ten years, visualizing capitalism and consumerism on steroids, now it seems that things have passed me by. Whatever paintings I make now necessarily look back on this era that is ending rather than anticipating something to come. The world as I have always known it, one of growth and sprawl, technological acceleration and anxiety, ever-increasing complexity and capitalist frenzy driven to unseen, dizzying heights—that world has been turned on its head. When I was making Convergence, I wanted to express a feeling that energy and speed were so intense that a flurry of fragments was momentarily held aloft. Now we see that when the consumption stops, it’s all just an illusion.
In early 2007, I began a series of paintings titled The Sorrows of Democracy, loosely based on the rise-and-fall cycle in Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire. I’ve spent much of the last year and a half working on one of the centerpieces of this series, The Triumph of Democracy. In a statement for the project written last December, I proposed that while one could quibble about where exactly America might be on this fated continuum, it seemed that we were at least in the neighborhood of Consummation. I think most people would agree that that assertion no longer holds. Cole’s paintings were mostly an exercise in the epic sublime rather than a prediction, although one could make the case that he was moralizing about the dangers of industrialization. But he was painting at the beginning of the American Republic and there was no imminent threat of the destruction that he envisioned. When I began the project, I intended my paintings to be more of a warning than a prediction, as well as a chronicle of the Bush years and a lament over our sorry state of affairs. And yet here we are. The events of the last few months have caught everyone off guard. Alan Greenspan, chief architect of our house of cards, is shocked. He finally found a flaw.
So now that the consequences of our Brave New World are upon us, what do we do? It’s a mistake to succumb to the same kind of psychology that got us here. It’s not the end of the world. As we’ve seen from the technology bubble as well as the housing bubble, we are not really in a new world order and the same old rules have not been suspended because of globalization or efficiency or changes in technology. The financial wizards thought that the fragmentation and globalization of risk strengthened the system when it in fact infected it. We’ve borrowed, consumed, built and leveraged our way into excess, and now we will have to pay for it until things get back to normal. Normal means we do the work of progress, not of speculation. Normal means we invent and make things that serve a purpose and solve problems, then we can consume sensibly based on that economy. We work toward a real utopia rather than its simulacrum.
But I feel like I don’t really need to say this because we already know it. We’ve always known it, and we’ve ignored it. There will come a time in the not-too-distant future when we’ll forget these lessons, because we live under capitalism, and capitalism is driven by a herd mentality. The bulls stampede over a cliff. The bears hibernate. Because of massive democratization at all levels of the market, from retail to homes to automobiles to finance, as well as rule-by-shareholder (thank you Technology, thank you Freedom), we’ve pretty much become what our Founders feared: a mob. That’s where government is supposed to come in. Most of us are now hoping it will.
Sweet dreams, Brave New World.

Benjamin Edwards
November 19, 2008
Past Writings:
The Triumph of Democracy, 2007
Dream City, 2005
The Origins of Republic, 2005
Reverse Perspective, 2005 (with images)
Statement, 2004
Statement, 2002
A Day in the World of Wal-Mart, 2001
Statement, 2000
To the Convenient Landscape and Back: The Effects of Mobility, 1997
Hypothetical Strategy, 1997