View from a manhole; damage dam-break; dom of dommage; taurine feces fence; chicanery chiclet; rush-to-fudge; jeerleader; freedom-loafer; warlard; crested mask-mocker; pharmacological jiggery-poker; spatchcocked eaglet; church-grade yellowcake; count no-count…
No matter how you pencil-whip it, Wharton-school it, or word-smith it, the bully virus — made great again in America — just keeps juking past every coughed-up hairball and tossed-up word-wall.
Poetry kicks in at such times — when farse alarms go off in decapitated duchies.
Build That Poem! Build That Poem! — A shield and bulwark ‘gainst the wooly bull*.
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
Is Art Complex?
“Great art is, by definition, complex…”
(David Zwirner, “Art Is How We Justify Our Existence,” 5-22-20)
Says who?* A thing, by definition, doesn’t define itself; its definition is a human construct — like art itself.
Religions are complex. Christianity, for example, embosoms a Trinity, an angelology with a ninefold celestial hierarchy, and persons called vaticanologists.
Is “Las Meninas” complex, or is it virtuosic — an exemplar of radical skill in the service of simplicity? Great art has a directness that can feel so massive it forces us to shift into a lower gear to pull it.
Zwirner bounces back insightfully at the end of his essay. He mentions how, during the lockdown, he has contacted many artists in their studios.
… I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was interrupting them. They had more important things to do than talk to me. They were making art.
*David Zwirner is an art dealer with galleries in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
(c) 2020 JMN