Death by Deceit

In the early 1980s, when I returned to painting and studio art after five years as a cultural activist in communities throughout New York City, I was preoccupied with studying the construction of our definitions of self: Who we think we are is becoming more and more predigested, interpreted, and controlled. I saw that our national institutions and belief systems were increasingly employed as social control mechanisms. Entertainment was a soft baton whose marks do not appear on the audience.

I felt then, and still do, that news media, pop culture, and fine art transcribe and integrate what become acceptable values and behaviors. The underlying purpose, besides short-term money, being to bind the individual to the power structure and perpetuate the system. Since the 1980s, the media have shined floodlights down the path to a major cultural and political shift. The nation's slide away from human values to embrace commodity valuables hit its stride with Ronald Reagan's merger of entertainment and far-right politics.

The accumulation of individual wealth and the attainment of glamour were to become our national religion. At the time, I saw the growth of mediated reality overtaking direct experience. And I sensed the emergence of a new personality type. I used the term mediated to describe a personality that gets most of what she or he knows about daily reality from mass-media sources.

Figure 1.

Between Time, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 84 × 84 in. Courtesy of the artist

Figure 2.

Road to Casablanca, 1985. Acrylic on canvas, 96 × 76 in. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist

I wanted to make my art be part of telling the story we live. So I decided to take a clue from the counterculture of the 1960s. I decided to intervene, to edit and compose another view of the reality generated by mass culture and fine art. I thought artists could function as witnesses by giving testimony. From a review of my work, I adopted the term Psycho-Pop, thinking of my images as conceptual art expressed in painting.

I began to think about mainstream media as deception: Not only do we get most of what we know from media sources, most of that is a lie. From the two cowboys, Reagan and Bush the younger, to Bill Clinton, the fake Elvis, back to Change We Can Believe In with Barack Obama, on to Donald Trump's current Joker impersonation, we get the "show." Offscreen is where the real deal goes down, mostly unseen. We live under deep cover with tragically permanent consequences.

Early one morning in May 2015, a team of Sloan Kettering specialists told my wife, Nora York, and me, she would likely die within a year to sixteen months. Nora and I lived, hand in hand, through the next terrifying fourteen months. Pancreatic cancer is an agonizing march of destruction through the digestive system. Victims starve to death in great pain.

As I write, television ads and social media postings are informing the New York region of a class action lawsuit seeking federal funds to cover as many as forty thousand people who were regularly exposed to the deadly toxins carried in the post-9/11 air over Lower Manhattan. Nora's death is one of several thousand already traced to breathing that toxicity. Thousands more will die because of the reassuring campaign of deception and lies orchestrated by the Bush administration through EPA director Christine Todd Whitman, President George W. Bush, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Following the destruction of the World Trade Towers, this trio took to the media. Bush urged everyone to "act normal," suggesting we take the family shopping. Whitman infamously appeared on TV with her children playing outdoors. Mayor Giuliani, riding a wave of presidential ambition, regularly appeared on news broadcasts touting normal behavior as the best revenge. All three lied about the toxicity we were breathing to keep the money flowing. Each of them signed death warrants for thousands when they agreed to lie about the horrifying dangers in what...