Monday, May 4, 2020

Magic Carpet

Try as they might there is no rug large enough to sweep some things under. They are going to need a magic carpet. The "they" in this case are the folks at the city and their captive corporations who got up to their eyeballs in the EWBOK kerfuffle they'd like to now see disappear. Sort of.

As they wound down the PR campaign waged thru local "news" outlets they pivoted to recovery mode with a YouTube video and a local podcast covering the Spruill Center and his twisted sister, Create Dunwoody, children of the Father City. These are excruciating and even those with a cast iron stomach should not attempt to get through them in one sitting lest they throw up in their mouth, just a little. Nonetheless there are nuggets to be mined here.

The video offers a level of uncomfortable juxtaposition and interplay not seen since Nixon and Kennedy. But we have a Six-Figure-Suit getting man-splained about how arts work and the intersection of the real world and the art world. Come to find out, Six-Figure-Suit had never seen past the immediate monetization of someone else's art to actually realize that the artist of that work had been promulgating it globally and has direct experience with over-saturation of his own work right here in Georgia. But that is what arts center leadership looks like in captive corporations.

The podcast is the typical pollyannish PR outlet pablum sporting the newly installed president of the [re]Create Dunwoody cap-corp. Sounding a bit like Carol Kane in Scrooged minus the moxie we find that the architect of the New Dunwoody, to replace Your Dunwoody, is a five year resident who is so in touch with the community that she had no idea that a nearby neighbor was a capable vocalist. Probably didn't know that Curtis Mayfield lived in Dunwoody and may never have even heard of Curtis Mayfield. But given a novice perspective armed with detachment and profound myopia is it any surprise she looks around Your Dunwoody and only sees blanks and empty spaces to be filled with her tchotchke-s?

These two ship dits collide in a Dunwoody-worthy fuster cluck with no skidmarks and only money as evidence of the impact. Towards the end of the podcast (do yourself a favour and skip the first two thirds) you'll hear Create Dunwoody brag of getting five grand to about seven "starving artists"--about $600-$700 per. Given they monetized someone's work without remuneration it would appear the policy is to create impoverished artists so they can "serve" impoverished artists. As if the starving artists community needs enlargement. And artists certainly don't need someone taking an enormous cut to move their own money around.

So what happened to the other tens of thousands of dollars bragged about in previous PR releases? For that you must go the the 8:15 to 9:00 mark in the YouTube video where Six-Figure-Suit defends his cap-corp with the assertion that they never took a dime from sales and everything went to support artists except direct costs. It would appear that "direct costs" are an overwhelming part of the operation and yet these have never been detailed nor made public. Perhaps this went to a sign maker. Perhaps a sign maker whose business it has been to litter Your Dunwoody with all manner of signage. Given these are the captive corporations of the city it would be most interesting to know if any recipients of sign contracts made any donations to city elected officials, before or after contract award, or to any of these cap-corps.

There is a name for this circuitous movement of money. It ain't "magic."