Over breakfast I mentioned these two news items today, and James suggested the connection.

Jack Levine, Welcome Home, 1946, via his obituary in the New York Times

It shows an armchair general being honored at an expensive restaurant, a wad of food in one cheek. On his right sits a bored socialite. Two decrepit businessmen in tuxedos make up the rest of the party. The central figure, Mr. Levine said, was "the big slob who is vice president of the Second National Bank and the president of the Chamber of Commerce, only now he's been in the Army."

When "Welcome Home" was included in an exhibition of American culture in Moscow in 1959, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities mounted a campaign to have it removed. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "It looks more like a lampoon than art, as far as I am concerned," but refused to intervene.

The uproar made Mr. Levine a star. He later told an interviewer, "You get denounced by the president of the United States, you've hit the top."

Fired Afghanistan Commander Named to JetBlue Board

Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired by President Barack Obama after making insulting comments about top administration officials, was named Tuesday to the JetBlue Airways Corp. board of directors.

Delete Billboard for the 2009 New York Street Advertising Takeover by Ji Lee, image via his website

I don't have a lot of illusions about privacy when using social media such as Flickr or Twitter, but there is a difference when a company like Facebook behaves in a really sleazy fashion.

I work on websites every day, including my own such as the art calendar ArtCat. I did not start out with one privacy policy for the calendar, and then gradually claim the right to use more and more information submitted to us. For example, I could offer a list of contemporary art galleries for sale to advertisers or artists looking for representation, but that would be wrong because it's not what the galleries expected when they gave information to us. However, given the changes in Facebook's privacy policy since 2005, they would consider this perfectly reasonable behavior.

In addition, with recent changes to their development platform, Facebook applications have more and more access to your private data, including applications you have not chosen to install, but your friends have. Want to share information only with friends? You're sharing it with applications that your friends use.

And how about those neat new sharing tools introduced by Facebook? Until they corrected a bug, visiting sites that are using Open Graph allowed them to install an application to your profile without asking you. Given their privacy track record, including the recent exposure of private chats, I wouldn't trust them to fix those holes quickly. "Instant personalization" indeed.

Related:

• The Rumpus: Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee
• rocket.ly: Why You Should Still Quit Facebook
• ReadWriteWeb: How to Delete Facebook Applications
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections
• groovyPost: How to Permanently Delete your Facebook Account

Paddy Johnson says, "I am only human!" [via John W Beaman's photos on Facebook of #class Rant Night]

Given my lack of time for blogging, and knowing more people would see it and discuss it there, I shared my notes from my rant on the last night of #class with Art Fag City. Don't miss the comments.

Part of the point of #class was to propose solutions, not just whine, so here are my thoughts. As the number of culture critics and writers decline in the printed media, the online world is replacing them, but getting paid enough to write is a big problem, even for relatively well-known writers such as Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City. As the co-founder of Culture Pundits and Idiom, it's something I worry about quite often, and both were founded to find some support for good writing.

My proposal: arts organizations such as The Art Dealers Association of America and the New Art Dealers Alliance should use a portion of their membership dues to fund arts writing. I'm sure similar groups exist for theater and dance as well, but the area I know best is the visual arts. In the long run, they need people to write about art, including their artists and exhibitions, and if people are too broke or busy freelancing to do so, no one wins. For a fraction of the cost of attending even a single art fair, the pooled resources could make a big difference in the quality and quantity of art criticism. Heck, perhaps some of this money could even fund some good editors to work with bloggers and other writers who would like that assistance!

Implementation details, such as an advisory committee for handing out the money, can be discussed. I would strongly recommend against a big proposal process, as I think that takes away from the time writers could use for better purposes. Writers who are interested in being considered could fill out a simple web form with a link to some samples of their writing for a committee to consider. In the interest of smoothing cash flow for all parties involved, the awards could even be monthly payments rather than lump sums. PayPal works very nicely for that.

Related: Two Coats of Paint on art bloggers, legitimacy, and awards.

Lately I've seen a few gallery opening announcements where the beverage sponsor was Jamaican beer Red Stripe. This makes a good "teaching moment." Jamaica is the most dangerous place in the Caribbean for queer people, with a government that regularly issues anti-LBGT statements, and a dance hall culture whose musicians regularly call for violence against queer people in their lyrics. Much of Jamaica's income comes from investment, trade, and tourism from the United States. This is no time to do business with Red Stripe or for that matter Myers Rum. Visit Pam's House Blend and Boycott Jamaica for more information.

I guess the pricey gallery website provider exhibit-e has heard of my ArtCat hosting business for artists and galleries. They are buying ads on the keyword "artcat" so that their ad appears when people Google it.

I spotted this in SoHo last Saturday, stuck to the window of the old Guild & Greyshkul space.

File storage and bandwidth are unlimited for all web sites hosted at ArtCat.

We stopped measuring storage space and bandwidth used by individual sites some time ago, but I realized that I never announced that or updated the text on the website. Now I have!

When I first started ArtCal in 2004, ArtCat web hosting for artists already existed. The latter doesn't stand for anything, but ArtCal was suggested by a friend as short for "Art Calendar."

Given the fact that I have trademarked ArtCat, and I own the .com for it, I always meant to consolidate everything -- artist and gallery web hosting, the calendar, and the zine, into one brand with interlinked sites, and now I have! As part of a redesign for the new Culture Pundits advertising format, I worked with the brilliant artist and designer Michael Mandiberg to come up with a new look.

We are still tweaking the design, but go check it out. I'm quite happy with it.

[Watch for changes to this blog and James's as well in the next 24 hours.]

This post at Daily Kos is the best summary I've read about how we reached this point of near collapse of our financial systems. Spoiler alert: former Senator Gramm (McCain's chief economic adviser) and formed Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan are bad buys. Here are some interesting statistics, which come from a conversation between business correspondent Bob Moon and host Kai Ryssdal on American Public Media's "Marketplace" in the spring.

BOB MOON: OK, I'm about to unload some numbers on you here, so I'll speak slowly so you can follow this.

The value of the entire U.S. Treasuries market: $4.5 trillion.

The value of the entire mortgage market: $7 trillion.

The size of the U.S. stock market: $22 trillion.

OK, you ready?

The size of the credit default swap market last year: $45 trillion.

KAI RYSSDAL: That's a lot of money, Bob.

So we can't have health care for everyone because that would be socialist, but the government just took 80% ownership of AIG? Crazy.