de Appel // Everything is New // The Right to Breath as Shibboleth
Part i: "What I say now may not be true tomorrow"
I picture us like a PacMan macroverse. 7.8 billion Inkies, Blinkies, Pinkies and Clydes swarming, munching dots, dodging boogie-ghouls until a glitch freezes our hubbub at random. Liminal transitions suddenly feel like forever positions.
But in reality, that's a view of privileged malaise. With two 00's like nostrils through which to inhale and exhale, 2020 is the year of reckoning the relative right to breath as a shibboleth dividing the global populous into two classes. The 'essentials' who bare the heaviest risk of infection and are disproportionately low-paid people of color, and the 'non-essentials' who are asked to stay shut-in based on the hope that one day a tomorrow will arrive when we can step out to a so-called "new" normal. Meanwhile collective, but highly uneven, sacrifices of financial health are being made for our bodily health and for that of our neighbors. It would be remiss to not acknowledge that 'crisis' is 'profit opportunity' by another name, so some will leverage this unprecedented health crisis into unprecedented windfalls. These will be the noblesse collectors and patrons of art after-covid. Museum and gallery directors know this. But for now, they must trim costs, bring their organizations to a social-media-active version of business hibernation, and wait.
Image Credit: “How to Take Down a Monument”, (2020). A poster by Decolonize this Place. Instructions by Sarah Parcak as @indyfromspace on Twitter
