A Numerical Look at the Often Overlooked

It is so easy to not think about how much one wastes during the course of an average day; a plastic bottle gets thrown away, or a light gets left on. Things like these happen all of the time, to everyone. Some might say, “So what? It’s just one piece of trash and a little wasted electricity.” Unfortunately, such wastefulness is a big deal, especially when one considers the total magnitude of it in regards to the U.S. population as a whole. Modern-day artist Chris Jordan does a great job of giving people a more accurate perspective. Through his stunning and often beautiful ink-jet prints, Jordan reminds everyone just how important it is to limit our consumption of already limited resources.

At Chris Jordan’s exhibit Running the Numbers in the WSU Art Museum, a few works stand out in particular. His ink-jet print entitled Lightbulbs (2008) is both incredibly beautiful and eye opening. From far away, one might look at the print and see what appears to be a gorgeous celestial body of some kind, possibly a galaxy suspended in space. The galaxy spirals inward and draws its viewers closer. Once up close however, it becomes clear that the galaxy is not made of stars but of light bulbs; 320,000 of them in fact. That large amount of light bulbs represents, according to Jordan, the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted through residential use every minute. That is a ridiculous waste of electricity. However, an obvious question one should ask about this work is, “How exactly does Jordan define wasted residential use?” If those numbers are coming from power companies, there is no way to really know if all or any of that electricity is truly being wasted. Someone might have turtles which require a heat lamp all night, or someone might live in a neighborhood with a lot of burglary and he or she leaves the lights on at night as a crime deterrent. There is just too much variability in electrical usage. Yet even if the actual number was more like 100,000 light bulbs worth of wasted electricity, that is still a significant waste. This print however, was not the only one that stood out within the gallery.

Chris Jordan’s work entitled Toothpicks (2008) also contains a very strong message for its viewers. Just like with Lightbulbs, this ink-jet print can also be very deceptive from a distance. At first glance one sees what appears to be a peaceful wheat field. Upon a closer, second glance however, it becomes obvious that those are not stalks of wheat but toothpicks; approximately 100,000,000 in fact. According to Jordan, that number of toothpicks represents the number of trees cut in one year to make just the paper for all the junk mail that circulates the United States. Yet can such a staggering number be accurate? Again, one must call into question the validity of such a statement. Jordan does not mention what exactly he considers junk mail to be. One person might view an ad for a shoe sale as junk and another person might see it as an important notification. Such a subjective measure requires some definition. However, just as in the case of Lightbulbs, reducing the number of trees cut down to 50,000,000 would more than cover the percent error and still effectively display how wasteful Americans have become.

Another one of Jordan’s works, appropriately named Ben Franklin (2007), again provides an impressive representation of consumption. In this work, Jordan not only raises waste issues but political ones as well. This print, which from afar appears to be just the standard face of Ben Franklin from the $100 bill, is actually contrived of 125,000 individual $100 bills each shaded a little differently. This amount of money ($12.5 million) is how much the United States government was spending on the Iraq war per day in 2007. The statement Jordan makes with this work is very strong because not only is his statistic staggering, but there is much less debate behind the accuracy of these numbers. There is no room for subjectivity surrounding what Jordan meant by dollars spent per day. As a result, the viewer is definitely left with a strong sense of disgust about how frivolously the United States government spends money it simply does not have.

With just one quick walk through his exhibit, Chris Jordan uses his computer-generated prints to develop a very strong theme. Each one of his works appear to be nothing more than a simple image if one does not take a closer look. The wasteful consumption of Americans is very much the same. Most people do not see their wastefulness as a big issue until they take a closer look and notice what is really going on. While some of Jordan’s statistics do raise some questions, even those works still succeed in getting people to talk about the issues at hand. Overall, Chris Jordan does a phenomenal job of raising awareness about the consumption crisis that is starting to plague our country and our world.

Can the Concept of Beauty Really be Defined?

To me, beauty has always seemed simple and straight forward. When I looked at, tasted, smelled, heard, or touched something that appeared pleasing, I simply thought of it as beautiful. However, beauty is quite a bit more complicated than just initial sensations. Kant delves into this complex notion of “the beautiful” in his Critique of Judgment.

For Kant, the idea of beauty goes beyond cognition. One can not simply think something is beautiful. He writes, “The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective” (98). As soon as you become personally interested in something, your prejudice immediately nullifies your ability to accurately and universally determine if that thing is in fact beautiful. Kant supports this statement when he says, “Everyone must admit that a judgment about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is not a pure judgment of taste” (99). However just smelling a fragrant rose from the unbiased position of a first timer, still does not equip you with everything necessary to determine beauty. The senses can only tell you what is pleasant or gratifying to you. They can’t tell if something is universally beautiful. Pleasant sensation can however provide a person with a representation of the object simply in relation to sense; something Kant would argue is a piece of the whole puzzle. The other, more important aspect to an object’s beauty is the concept of the good.

Kant believes that it is not just the representation of the truly beautiful object that pleases, but also its existence. This is manifested in “the good”. “Whatever by means of reason pleases through the mere concept is good. That which pleases only as a means we call good for something (the useful), but that which pleases for itself is good in itself” (100). It is only through judgment about this concept of the good that has “logical and not merely aesthetical universality, for they are valid of the object as cognitive of it, and thus are valid for everyone” (106). This idea is interesting though because Kant then goes on to say, “If we judge objects merely according to concepts, then all representation of beauty is lost” (106). That seems a little contradictory to me. He spent all this time developing a structure for how beauty is defined and then he throws it all out the window. Kant writes, “Thus there can be no rule according to which anyone is to be forced to recognize anything as beautiful” (106). Maybe truly beautiful objects can never really be defined, kind of like a caged animal. When you go to a zoo, there is something about the cage around the tiger that detracts from its beauty. Attempting to define a beautiful object is like putting a cage around it. You simply can’t pull it off without altering what’s inside. Consequently, people can never really know what is beautiful. However, through the use of our senses and our recognition of other’s opinions, we can get a pretty “good” idea.

What Makes Something Tasteful?

Taste is a concept that has been and remains even to this day, an elusive term. No one has ever really been able to define what is considered tasteful and what is not. Taste is something that is incredibly subjective and constantly changing. For an example, just think about when you were a little kid and the foods you ate. You probably ate things then that you would not touch with a ten foot pole today. I know I did. I use to eat green tomatoes off the vine when I was four years old. Today, I do not even eat ripe tomatoes. While most of us would probably cringe at the idea of eating green tomatoes, who is to say it is not tasteful? At the time, I sure liked them. To me, they tasted great. Is that all that matters? Does it only take one person to make something tasteful? David Hume would certainly agree.

To Hume, taste is all about sentiment. “It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another” (80). However, a single, universal “Standard of Taste”, may not exist at all. Hume goes on to say, “All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it” (80). As long as one person finds sentiment or taste in something, it becomes tasteful to that person; tastefulness is not something that can have a strict definition. With this notion in mind, I can definitively say that both the paintings of the monkey and of the man are tasteful.

When I look at the two paintings, I can easily see why someone might say that either of those two works are distasteful. The picture of the man is quite ugly. The man has very distinct, primate facial features. He also has a fairly creepy grin on his face. The monkey is pictured as civilized, almost too much so. Someone might take offense at the fact that a monkey is pictured smelling a flower; as if that particular human activity should be above primates. I however, believe that both paintings are very tasteful. While some people may like to think people are very different from primates, we really aren’t. There is a lot of evidence to support that humans descended from apes. Not only that, some human behavior can be quite savage at times and very primate-like. I like the two paintings because they both point out these similarities. So you might say those paintings are tasteful, because those paintings are tasteful to me.