Who, Where Are ‘Experts’?

Cathy Curtis opens her article (“Some Thoughts on Artists Who Abandon Easel for Soapbox,” Calendar, April 27) with this statement: “Artists tend to feel even more passionate than the rest of us about the purpose of life and the crises we face.” This revealing statement tells me two things: that Curtis seems to consider herself somehow separate from artists, and that she idealizes artists as special and therefore endowed with heightened feelings.

It seems that, according to her, we artists should be allowed to express our “passions” safely fenced in and segregated from the public. Inside the vacuum of our art Thermos bottles, we are to be glorified. Outside of those well-delineated parameters, however, we are to keep our mouths shut because we are not “experts.”

Cathy is “damned” if she is to be harangued from such a “non-expert,” who gets her information “from books she read.” Where does Cathy get her information, I wonder? Are not we artists allowed to read, and to quote from such sources? Are books not legitimate sources of information and inspiration? Is not the propagation of ideas from books and word of mouth an acceptable basis for discourse? Or is this mode of discussion only accessible to “experts”? What experts? Those with college degrees? Those who write books as opposed to those who read them? Those whose titles identify them as expert in a field, rather than those who are “passionate” about that field?

I used to be a “good girl” and do what Curtis obviously wants me to continue doing: confine my beliefs to my art and shut up about them in ordinary reality. I don’t any more. I think that if anything the Los Angeles riots recently have shown that we no can longer expect the “experts” to save us from ruin.

Every person has a right and even a duty to speak about the issues that we are in total denial about and that threaten our society, our survival, life as we know it. I say: Talk, Talk, Talk! whether you are entitled to because of your “expert” badge or not. We need a radical transformation of consciousness, and any and all means to that effect are OK.

Curtis doesn’t believe me when I describe the rate of extinction brought on by our species. Just to set the record straight, my information comes from a (aaargh!) book, Jeremy Rifkins’ “Biosphere Politics.” Page 73. To quote the exact line: “The loss of entire species in the tropics exceeds the natural rate of extinction by as much as 10,000 times. Within the next decade, we may lose nearly 20% of all the remaining species of life on Earth.”

This assessment is not unique with Rifkin but is common with students of the ravages humans have wrought upon the biosphere in this century, and the specific percentage would not be suspect or doubtful to anyone who has read the literature.

I pushed Curtis’ buttons with my statements about the consumption of animals. Our society is fixated on meat-eating. But the “experts” say that it is economically, ecologically, socially and morally wrong.

Cattle are a major cause of desertification and deforestation, and in this country alone, around one-third of our arable topsoil has disappeared, never to return. Bovines consume 16 pounds of grain to their pound of protein, grain that could feed some of the millions of famine-stricken humans on this planet (source: the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service and Agricultural Research Service’s “Diet for a Small Planet”).

Meat is bad for us. We have evolved with herbivore intestines--very long ones, as opposed to the short intestines of carnivores, short so as to keep rotting meat inside them for as short a digestion time as possible. We insist on making meat continually a larger proportion of our diets, thus incurring colon cancer and many other meat-related diseases--facts that the meat and foodie industries are not about to promote.

Industrial breeding in factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses are moral abominations. I refer you to such books (again!) as “Animal Factories” by Jim Mason and Peter Singer, “Diet for a New America” by John Robbins and “The Power of Your Plate” by Neal Barnard, MD (ah, a real expert!). If you are interested in the feminist implications of meat, there is “The Sexual Politics of Meat” by Carol J. Adams.

When I say that “animals are not ours to eat,” I am stating a moral imperative to which more and more people are beginning to adhere. Sue Coe, a visual artist, addresses these matters with all the “passion” I admire and lectures about the issues also, transforming meat-eaters into vegetarians right and left with her “rant”!

Curtis is equally appalled that I call for an end to the “cancer-like proliferation and breeding” of our species. Why? I don’t advocate enforced eugenics. Quite the contrary: I advocate education (those damn books again!).

It is obvious to any thinking person that the planet cannot sustain the uncontrolled and insane proliferation of humans; in the next centuries our population will hit the 50 billion mark. Experts have shown that the more educated a woman is, the less pregnant she gets.

As it is, nature is being eradicated everywhere, habitat is ravaged, in order to attempt to feed and house the open-ended and astronomical growth of our species. As for those Curtis calls the “children, born or unborn,” until we can educate them and nurture them adequately, both physically and emotionally, they had better stay “unborn.” How will the hordes of “children” who grow up as unskilled laborers survive in a world that has no need, place, food or work for them?

We suffer from the Western paradigm of separateness and superiority to Nature and the rest of the community of life, which we deem ours to “subdue, overwhelm, conquer and enslave,” as the 16th-Century philosopher Francis Bacon put it. This world view has brought us to the brink of disaster. Unless we begin to regard the rest of creation as part of a network in which we are interwoven along with all other organisms, we will not get out of our mess alive.

Ah, but so long as we act with the supremacy of people in our hearts and minds, it’s OK! Curtis is shocked that I seem to place equal value on other species, i.e. (God forbid!) animals. Here is the crux. Yes, I see the world not as a hierarchy with “man” at the top, but as an interrelated web, with every part of equal but different importance.

That is a very radical thought indeed in our society. I never implied that my dogs are, in the infinite scheme, “more valuable than somebody’s children, born or unborn” (Curtis), although they may be to me. I did very strongly imply that by getting “further away from animals” (Rosenthal), we lose touch with nature, our origins, the vast continuum of life, and our place here on Earth.

I don’t give talks about my “rich background, (my) friendships with well-known figures in the art world, the development of (my) style” (Curtis) anymore. This is “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” mentality. If people want to know, they can ask and I tell them. I am not interested in making that the focus of my talks. I have spoken about issues all over the Untied States, in theaters, on campuses, in museums.

The response has been overwhelming. People want these matters aired. People want to talk about the discussion, pro and con. I don’t “appoint (myself) ecological spokeswoman” (Curtis). It indeed would be absurd. I appoint myself human being who wants to discuss ecological issues because I believe that they are key and that they reach deeply into our spirituality and epistemology. I want to move people through my art and, yes, through discourse; and to confront all of our denials and paradoxes and to open forums everywhere to the burning issues that face us.

I am sorry if Curtis sees this as a “rant” instead of a “work of art.” A lecture is not a work of art to begin with. But I invite her to my next performance where she can be treated to a good art “rant” which she can wholeheartedly embrace since she will be witnessing my expertise in my chosen field.