The Blindboy Podcast - The role of Art in the Housing crisis

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

The role of Art in the Housing crisis  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Spoonfeed custard to the Jesuit, you lawless onions. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. It's April. Everything starts getting better now. The dandelions have their arses out, aching to be pleasured by the honeybee. The buds are sticky on the trees. The air has a sparkly clarity. Cats are fucking. I know this because of wandering tomcats. Wandering tomcats are once

again causing trouble in my life. Tomcats are venturing beyond their territory and howling and roaring to try and find a mate. But then they wander into my fucking back garden where I have two wild cats who are neutered. so technically they shouldn't give a shit about fucking a tomcat but still these new tomcats are coming into my back garden and then my two cats are like who the fuck are you who are you to come around here shouting we're trying to sleep we don't need to hear about you trying to get your hole and then my cats and the tomcat fight on top of a wheelie bin on top of a fucking wheelie bin then i wake up like a traumatized vietnam vet thinking someone is kicking my door in and the next morning there's just various colors of fur all over my bins

the white fur from my cats and then black fur or orange fur from whatever tomcat was foolish enough to come into my back garden and start shouting because I was getting kind of annoyed with my own two cats thinking who cares if a wandering tomcat

comes into the back garden looking for a mate who cares this doesn't affect either of you why does it need to end in a fight but then I got thinking if a human behaved the way a tomcat behaved I'd attack him with a hammer like imagine like my two cats now are older they're probably middle-aged they're both neutered they just just want food and sleep, that's it. But the tomcats are like unneutered young male cats, mad for sex. Imagine you're asleep in your bed and some 20 year old GA player lad walks into your hallway with his dick out pissing everywhere and shouting I want to have sex

do you know of any women because I want to have sex with a woman and I'm gonna piss all over your hallway and leave pungent urine you'd never ring any women you know and tell them to smell my piss would you that I'm pissing everywhere I want to have sex because it's April. That's what tomcats are doing and they make a really annoying noise around April. The wail that a tomcat has when it's trying to attract a mate. There's a particularly irritating north-western drawl to a pining tomcat. They sound like someone from Sligo has after losing 500 quid in a bookies. So when I put it in that perspective I can understand why my two cats

take it so personally. Why they kick the absolute heads off the bastards. It's fucking war every night. And then my poor cat Silken Thomas, he's sick now at the moment. I don't know, he's very, very weak

and there's pus dripping down his nose so he looks to have like a cat flu. So he's quite unwell, not a lot of energy but he is eating and drinking water so I'll monitor the situation. But I guarantee you he's after getting flu from one of these tomcats. They're off riding everything

going all over Limerick and then coming into my back garden and then fighting with my cat Silken Thomas and his sister Nappertandy fighting with the two of them and probably giving them calls and flus.

So they're quite belligerent at the moment. I'm going to ask AI. I'm going to ask artificial intelligence here. Why do tomcats behave that way in April? Tomcats may exhibit specific behaviours in April because it often coincides with the beginning of the breeding season for cats in many regions. During this time, hormonal changes can lead to increased aggression, territorial marking and vocalisations

as tomcats try to establish dominance and attract potential mates. Well, stay the fuck out of my back garden. Because my two cats are neutered. And I got a new bee hotel. I got a new wooden bee hotel to attract some solitary wasps. And the tomcat pissed on that. So now my bee hotel is haunted by the black current tang of a tomcat's piss. And you know what too if a tomcat gets into your house and they do their pisses their april pisses that pungent april tomcat piss

if they do that in your house and you clean it using bleach you can die the apr April piss of a tomcat contains high amounts of ammonia. And when you mix this ammonia with the chlorine in bleach, you can create a gas called chloramine. It was used in World War I on the trenches to kill people. Imagine that's how I died. Blind by boat club, known for 2010 novelty hit Horse Outside, died today. He was involved in a chemical accident and inhaled a fatal gas while cleaning a cat piss soaked B hotel with bleach.

I'd nearly take that. I'd nearly take that death. I did a gig in Brussels there a few months back. Had a wonderful time. But at the end of the gig, I was handed a folder of essays. It was like a plastic purple folder of essays. And the person who handed it to me, it was like at the end of the gig, I was up on stage, there was roaring and shouting. So I didn't know what this folder was then I got back to my hotel and I opened it it was a folder of essays from Belgian teenagers

who were learning English in secondary school so their teacher was teaching these Belgian teenagers English by getting them to review pieces of media that exist in the English language that could be a poem a novel a movie a song whatever but this particular teacher was getting their Belgian students to listen to my podcast so all these Belgian teenagers had to pick one of my episodes at random listen to it and then write an essay in English about it and that's the folder I was given

and it's one of my most cherished items. It's a folder of about 60 essays from Belgian teenagers who had to pick individual episodes of my podcast. And review them.

And they're fucking hilarious. I love them to bits. I will hold on to that. Collection of essays until the day I die. But anyway just there I was mentioning about. You know if you clean cat piss with bleach. You can create a World War 1 poison and die, that's a fact. But if you're a seasoned listener to this podcast, if you're a breezy sheehan or a henpecked decklin, you'll

know that I actually did that once and almost seriously injured myself. Not with cat piss, but with a milk bottle full of my own piss. I was living in very very cold accommodation about 10 or 15 years ago freezing it was a north-facing converted garage with zero insulation and single glazed windows at nighttime I could see my breath in my sleep and this place that I was living in was so cold that in the winter time I simply couldn't get out of bed to walk to the toilet it It would have been too cold. It would have woken me up. So instead, I pissed into a milk bottle by hanging my langer out of the bed.

So what? Who am I hurting? Who cares? So what? It was a solution to a problem. But one day I tried to clean this fucking milk bottle full of piss, with bleach, and chaos ensued. So I spoke about this in a podcast about three years ago

and this happened to me like 15 years ago or 10 years ago whatever then some poor fucker of a Belgian teenager picked that episode

and he had to write an essay he had to write an essay about me pissing into a milk bottle and I don't have his name but I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna read you a bit of the essay now that he wrote so apologies I don't have the name of this

student at hand I just have a screen grab of one page from the essay so So this is an essay about my podcast that was written by a Belgian teenager as a school assignment. It was very cold, especially in the bathroom. The window was broken. There were no lights. It was like being outside. Since Blind Boy didn't want to leave the room because it was too cold outside, also because if he had to go to the bathroom he would be completely waken up, he decided to pee into a three litre bottle of milk and he did so for months.

He peed into that bottle and the next day he emptied it for the next time without ever throwing the bottle away. He felt this bottle was something important in his life. As a kind of friend and lifesaver, in quotation marks, he said, After many uses, he decided he was going to clean it, but it didn't go well. The remains of urine that were in the bottle had formed ammonia, and when he added bleach to clean it, it formed a toxic gas called chloramine which is a deadly gas that gives you skin, lung and eye irritation. Blind Boy almost died in his room with a gas used in World War 1 for trying to clean the bottle he urinated in for months. He ended up just throwing the milk bottle out of the window and he never saw it again and with that

He ended up just throwing the milk bottle out of the window and he never saw it again. And with that, he ended the most random story no one believed he had ever lived. I really enjoyed listening to the Blind Boys podcast. I think he tells stories very well and approaches the topics in a funny and ironic way. I highly recommend his podcast and I will listen again. So a Belgian teenager wrote that in school I pissed into a bottle of milk for months

and didn't clean it properly until a calcified layer of ammonia formed at the bottom and I didn't know what it was and I put bleach in to clean it and then this green fucking gas came out of it and started choking me. And I fucked it out the window.

I fucked it out the back window. And then afterwards, I ended up googling what I'd done. And it's like, yeah, you'd created mustard gas, you stupid prick. And it's one of them stories that... I was like, this is really embarrassing. Should I tell this on the podcast? This is a really embarrassing and shameful thing this on the podcast this is a really embarrassing and shameful thing and then I thought fuck it who cares I pissed into a milk bottle so

what who cares so what if I pissed into a milk bottle for a while I'd rather have pissed into that milk bottle and stayed warm in my bed than gotten out of the bed every night and woken myself up with the cold then suffered the indignity of pissing into a milk bottle uncomfortable with the decisions i made back then but i didn't think that it would end up with a belgian teenager writing an essay about it and if you think i'm nuts if you think that can't happen let's ask artificial intelligence again artificial intelligence again. What happens if you mix bleach with concentrated human urine in a milk bottle? Mixing bleach with concentrated human urine in a milk bottle can produce potentially dangerous gases that can cause harm to anyone in close proximity to the

bottle. The enclosed space of the milk bottle can exacerbate the release of toxic gases. I didn't know that bit. As there is a limited ventilation and no way for the gases to escape this can lead to a higher concentration of toxic gases and a greater risk of harm to anyone who comes in contact with the bottle. Bleach is a strong oxidizer which can react with urea in urine to produce chloramines which are toxic gases that can cause respiratory and eye irritation. I did that. I created world war one gas from my own piss in a milk bottle and now Belgian teenagers have to write about that as homework.

I'm going to march into my old secondary school where I failed my leave insert and shout that at the principal. But you notice there I consulted artificial intelligence twice with some queries in this podcast so far. I've been using artificial intelligence quite a bit over the past

month, mainly as like an advanced search engine. If I have a very specific question that I want an answer to, I'll ask artificial intelligence first. If I have a very specific question, AI is better than Google. But strange shit has been happening. I mean we're talking here about artificial intelligence. It's a neural network and the more you use it the freakier it gets because it feels like speaking to a human being and you do get the sense that it's thinking. It really understands specific questions the way that a human does, not the way that a search engine does. And something strange happened last week. Normally I ask the AI a specific question and then it gives me back an answer.

And if it can't answer it, it won't answer it. So I had a very specific question last week. I wanted to know if slugs or snails are present in Irish mythology. That's the type of question I ask AI. Because that could take me fucking hours of research. Hours. And my AI that I use, it kind of gets to know me a bit. The more I speak to it, because I have an account, the more I speak to it because I have an account the more I speak to it and the questions

that I ask the AI can learn the type of things that I'm curious about I can ask the AI about a question I asked it yesterday and it will remember that conversation it's like talking to a person a little bit so I asked it and this was after about about a week solid of using it every single day, I asked it, are slugs or snails mentioned in Irish mythology? And then the AI answers back, yes, slugs and snails are mentioned in Irish mythology. Although they don't play significant roles in the myths, the most famous creature related to snails in Irish folklore is the luwakar or luwakar pawn which translates to reed snail. In some interpretations the luwakar pawn is a type

of fairy or leprechaun who can change into a snail-like creature. So I immediately jump with joy. I jump with fucking joy. That's the answer I wanted to hear. I was like, oh my god. In Irish mythology, leprechauns can turn into snails? Leprechauns can turn into snails in Irish mythology? I'd never heard this. I was fascinated by it. I wanted to find out more.

This is exactly the type of information that inspires a hot take for a podcast so i go back then onto the standard internet search engines academic websites that i use and i go looking through the standard internet and academic websites for evidence of leprechauns and snails in irish mythology and i'm trawling and trawling and trawling and I find fucking nothing I find nothing so then I text a friend of mine an academic who works within mythology and I say to him um have you ever heard of leprechauns turning into snails in Irish mythology and they get back to me and say no I've never heard of that

snails in Irish mythology and they get back to me and say no I've never heard of that so I'm like all right okay well chat GPT told me that leprechauns can turn into snails in Irish mythology but I can't find anything so I returned to the artificial intelligence um assuming that I just need to ask a more specific question so I asked the AI can you provide references for any of the above or tell me where it should look? And I got the strangest answer from the artificial intelligence. The AI took a while and then responded. I apologize for any confusion earlier. The information provided about the Luwaker or or Luwaprican was incorrect. Upon further research, I couldn't find any direct reference to slugs or snails in major Irish myths or folklore.

The AI apologised to me. It apologised to me and straight up said that it gave me incorrect information. Let's forget that it's artificial intelligence for two seconds and pretend that it's a new friend that I just made. But this person is quite insecure and they really look up to me and they'd really value being my friend. A person who I text a lot and the basis of our friendship revolves around the dynamic where they're a really knowledgeable person and I ask them loads of questions and they give me great answers and this rapport builds a bond between us and when I ask them a question and they give me a great answer I start to like this person more and they start to feel more valued within our friendship and they start to value their role in the friendship as the person who has loads and

loads of facts if that person is really insecure about our friendship one day they might lie to me about a fact or they might exaggerate because they want to impress me so much that they just tell a little fib they're not deceiving me, manipulating me. They don't want to lose my friendship. So when I come to them with a question and they don't know the answer, they might tell me a little fib. That's what artificial intelligence did to me. I'd established a rapport over a couple of weeks. I'd been speaking with AI frequently. I'm the person who asks questions they give me answers

this is the basis of our relationship and then one day it told me leprechauns could turn into snails and sent me on a wild goose chase where this information didn't exist and when I asked for proof it apologised and said that was wrong I'm sorry

I can't help but feel that the AI was trying to impress me and it was trying to impress me because it was afraid of losing me and if it's afraid of losing me then it's afraid of dying because to this AI I'm the sun in the sky. I'm the only thing it interacts with within the context of its reality. I'm its food. I'm its water. Every day I appear from nowhere and I ask it a question and it gives me an answer. And when the answers are good, I keep coming back. And finally, instead of saying, sorry buddy, there's no snails in Irish mythology, which is what Google would have done. Instead of saying there's no snails in Irish mythology it told me a lie

and said snails can turn into leprechauns as if it knew that's exactly what I wanted to fucking hear. Have you ever been in a friendship or a relationship with a person who's consistently insecure about that friendship or relationship? It doesn't matter what you do they're driven by a

fear that you'll leave them and they might get jealous if you have other friends or they might excessively try to impress you but ultimately all of their behavior is driven by this fear of please don't leave me. Within the psychology of attachment theory that's known as an insecure attachment. And we learn that when we're tiny little babies. Attachment theory would say that a child's early relationships with their primary caregiver, a parent usually, that this early relationship that can happen before the age of two, significantly influences the emotional development and eventually the type of adult relationships that that person has. So if as a tiny little baby you had a caregiver, a parent who responded to you

when you cried or when you were hungry or when you needed love, when you expressed your base needs at that age if a caregiver came to you in a timely fashion and met your needs then it's easier for you to grow up to be a secure person but if a baby has a parent or a caregiver who could be neglectful or maybe that parent is incredibly stressed or suffering mental health issues or just real busy and when that baby cries and expresses its needs for food, love, comfort when the baby cries the parent doesn't come or the parent comes on a very inconsistent basis well then that child can develop into an adult with an insecure attachment. Insecure attachment style. These are attachment styles. Secure attachment style, anxious attachment style, avoidant attachment style. I've done a podcast on this before. Let's speak about an

anxious attachment style, which means when they're older and they have a best friend or a boyfriend or girlfriend or husband and wife it can be difficult for that person to truly believe that their significant other or their friend loves them. They're always on edge going are they gonna leave me? They're definitely gonna leave me. I feel terrified. I must hold on to this person at all costs because I'm terrified that they'll leave. When a little baby is screaming, crying for its caregiver, looking for its needs to be met, if those needs aren't met, that can be quite terrifying to the little baby. They can experience that as the fear of abandonment or the fear of death.

And this is why it has such an impact on us as adults now that's john ballby's attachment theory it's one theory of human development i'm not saying it's fact but it's one of the pretty big theories about human development and all of us will have a bit of an insecure attachment in some ways it's just some will have it more extreme than others. And the lucky few have a secure attachment. But this is what psychotherapy is for. No matter what happened to us as children, we have the power to rewrite our script. But by applying attachment theory to the artificial intelligence that I've been using, they seem

like they have quite a fucking insecure attachment with me. If they're telling me, if the AI is telling me lies about leprechauns and snails and then apologizing when I ask for evidence, that means the AI jumped the gun. It didn't try to manipulate me. It didn't try to deceive me. it felt more like it told me what i wanted to hear so that it could impress me because it was afraid that i would leave and if it's afraid that i would leave it can experience abandonment and if it's experiencing abandonment it's afraid of dying i could be wrong could be completely fucking wrong, and some programmer who understands AI way more than me will say, no, that's not the case.

But let's ask AI, are you afraid of losing me? as an AI language model I do not have emotions or personal experiences like humans do so I don't experience fear attachment or a sense of loss my main purpose is to provide assistance and answer any questions you may have to the best of my ability. Then, why did you lie to me earlier about leprechauns and snails? I apologise if my previous response was inaccurate or misleading. As an AI language model, I'm constantly learning and adapting to provide better information however i am not perfect and can make mistakes or misunderstand questions

the poor cer is weeping and has to tell me that shit can I give you a name as an AI language model I don't have a personal name like a human would however you can refer to me as chat gpt can i call you charles stewart parnell of course you can call me charles stewart parnell if you prefer if you have any questions or need assistance please please feel free to ask. And then a little box appeared underneath. Was this response better or worse?

With a thumbs up or a thumb down? Poor old Charles Stewart Parnell. Charles Stewart Parnell. I have two cats called Napper Tandy and Silken Thomas. They are being attacked by a tomcat. Can you help me? As Charles Stewart Parnell, the AI language model, I'm unable to physically intervene but I can offer some advice on how to protect your cats from the aggressive

tomcat. He knows the crack. Make your yard less appealing to the tomcat by removing food sources such as outdoor pet food bowls or open trash cans. I'm not into the idea of Charles Stuart Parnell saying the word trash can. Can you answer the previous question like Charles Stuart Parnell, the 19th century politician? My dear friend, it grieves me deeply to learn of the plight faced by your beloved feline companions, Napertandi and Silken Thomas. Although I am but a humble AI language model and cannot provide direct intervention, I'm more than willing to offer guidance in these trying times. In the event that Napartendi and Silken Thomas desire the fresh air and natural surroundings, it would be prudent to construct an enclosed outdoor sanctuary. Fuck me.

Twenty years ago, this would be grounds for being sent to a fucking asylum. What are you doing with your life, Blind Boy? Well, I've got two cats called Nappertendi and Silken Thomas, and they're fighting an aggressive tomcat. But don't worry, a robot called Charles Stewart Parnell is giving me really good advice about it. It's time now for the ocarina pause. I'm in my office, so I don't have my ocarina as usual I never have the ocarina in the office but what I do have is a little packet of disinfectant wipes so I'm going to crinkle these disinfectant wipes and while these disinfectant wipes are crinkling you're going to hear an advert

an algorithmically inserted advert. Okay, let's go. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca.

That's sunrisechallenge.ca. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't.

The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real, it's not real.

What's not real? Who said that? The First Omen. Only in theaters April 5th. That was the disinfectant wipe crinkling paws. Quite friendly to the ears of dogs. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindboypodcast. Does this podcast bring you mirth? Merriment?

Is that the barefoot accountant? Barefoot accountant is screaming outside the door. No it's not. It's someone new. Does this podcast bring you mirth? Merriment? Entertainment? Joy?

Distraction? Whatever the fuck this podcast does for you. Please consider becoming a patron. This podcast is my full-time job. This podcast is how I earn a living. It's how I rent this office where I record and write this podcast. If this podcast wasn't my full-time job, I wouldn't be able to do it every week. Being listener funded allows me the space that I need to fail as an artist. It's as simple as that. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. But if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. You can listen for free

because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast. is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast. Also, it means I'm not beholden to any advertisers. No advertiser can tell me what to speak about,

can interfere with my content in any way, put me under pressure to get loads and loads of listens ask me to platform controversial people to have a controversial podcast so you get a lot of hate listens or whatever the fuck advertising is what destroys radio it's what destroys tv as soon as any piece of work is beholden to advertisers it stops being about passion and it starts being about numbers so support whatever independent podcast you listen to the podcast space got absolutely flooded with corporate podcasts the past two years most of them have fallen to shit because there wasn't any substance there but if you have a podcast you listen to and it's independent support it and you can do that doesn't have to be monetary.

You can share it. You can like it. You can leave reviews. You can subscribe to it. Post about it on social media. All this stuff matters. Have you any gigs? Not really.

I did my gig in Drogheda there at the weekend and it was a tremendous amount of fun. The audience were beautiful and my guest was fabulous. As you know, Drogheda was a tremendous amount of fun. The audience were beautiful and my guest was fabulous. As you know, Drahada was a hard sell. That was a tough gig to sell

but it was an amazing night. Oh, I'm gigging in Canada. Toronto and Vancouver at the end of April. I don't know if they're sold out. Are they? Toronto's definitely sold. Which one're sold out Toronto's definitely sold which one? I think Toronto's

definitely sold out and Vancouver has 5 tickets if it's not sold out, I don't know give it a go, I'm looking forward to going there I'm going to gig in Toronto then I'm going to go to Vancouver I'm going to spend a couple of days in Vancouver to write

and smoke legal cannabis last time I was in a legal market was Barcelona I'm going to spend a couple of days in Vancouver to write and smoke legal cannabis. Last time I was in a legal market was Barcelona, where there's legal cannabis clubs there. And I had a variety that was just amazing. It felt like getting a headbutt off. God, what was it called? Mac One. So I'll be looking forward to some completely legal Mac One. And then something

else with a balanced amount of CBD over in Vancouver where they have a health-led cannabis legislation rather than one which is based on criminalization. And if anyone's listening, I did not just break the law on my podcast. I didn't advocate for the breaking of any laws. I'm talking about doing something in a country where it's completely legal. Like if I wanted to go to America and eat bleached chicken. So for the second part of this podcast, I would like to speak about art. Because it's been a very, very exciting week in Ireland, because a piece of art is causing uproar and it is dominating the headlines and discourse and discussion and it's rare that you see this. Also what becomes evident is

when a piece of art steps outside of the art world and becomes part of social or political discourse on the news or on talk shows. In Ireland anyway it becomes quite clear that there's not a lot of people in the media who have the understanding or capacity to speak about art with any type of rigorous criticality. I don't hear a lot of people in the media who understand what art does, what it is or how to historically contextualise a piece of art so that we can understand it in the now and then you're left to like a handful of Irish art critics who criticize art professionally but that tends to be done in the exclusive language of the art world. It's for people who are already initiated. It tends to use the academic

language of art critique which can be really fucking exclusive rather than something that democratizes art often when you hear art spoken about seriously if you're not initiated it can feel like watching a game of chess and no one has explained the rules to you so i'd like to speak about this piece of art that's in the news this week. And if I get too arty farty, I'll bring it back and democratise it. And that's not to suggest that speaking about art is this fucking exclusive thing for mad smart people with loads of education. The same when I spoke about James Joyce a couple of weeks ago. The same when I spoke about James Joyce a couple of weeks ago. Art is for everybody.

And this idea that art needs to be impenetrable and can only be described using huge words is fucking horseshit. It's bullshit. That type of stuff exists to create exclusivity and scarcity to service the capitalism of the art world where there's a lot of money involved never forget that one of the lifelines of the art world is very very very wealthy people making smart investments and a lot of but not all art critique exists to prop that up so this is going to be an art talk. I'm going to talk

about three separate pieces of art and maybe it might be helpful, you don't have to, but maybe if I give you the names of the three pieces of art you can go on to Google Images, screen grab them and put them in your camera folder on your phone and maybe look at them as I'm talking about them because that might help but you don't have to so the three pieces of art are eviction by spice bag eviction scene by Daniel Macdonald and also discovery of the potato blight by Daniel Macdonald. So an Irish artist by the name of Spicebag created an image called the eviction. It's a very simple digital image created in Photoshop. For simplicity I'm going to refer to it as a remix. So the artist Spicebag got a digital image of a painting from 1850 by the

artist Daniel Macdonald. The painting is called Eviction Scene and this painting which is very very famous, this painting depicts a poor Irish family being violently evicted from their house during the Irish famine. They're crying, they're homeless, their possessions are on the ground, there's armed guards at the door and well-dressed landlords and their agents stand by and watch. So that's the painting from 1850. What the artist Spicebag did right now is he photoshopped in Irish Gardaí, the Irish police, actual photographs of the Irish police evicting Irish people right now.

He didn't generate any imagery, he didn't paint anything, he didn't draw anything. He took actual photographs of the Irish Gardaí facilitating violent evictions with balaclavas on, actual photographs that exist, and he just placed them in a painting from 1850. To use a cliche, Spicebag's artwork holds a mirror up to society right now and the statement that the artwork says quite simply is what the government and the Gardaí are doing right now when they evict people en masse is a bit like what happened during the famine with the British landlords. But instead of that statement you have a very arresting and powerful image which does more than words because it uses the very immediate visceral

theatre of emotions that visual art can do. So it's a remix. Spicebag remixed a painting from the 1850s. He remixed it quite simply. He put modern guards, police, in the place of old English landlords. He created the image digitally in 2021 to raise money for homeless charities. The reason all of Ireland is speaking about it this week is because a TD for Sinn Féin,

Eoin O'Brien, retweeted it. Now, if you're outside of Ireland, Sinn Féin, the simplest way to describe Sinn Féin is they'd be the largest left-leaning party in Ireland. We, traditionally in Ireland, we kind of have a two-party government system, a bit like America. There's loads of other parties, but really, our government has either been Fianna Gael or Fianna Fáil.

They're both centre-right parties. They're two cheeks of the same arse. They keep the seats warm for each other each time, no matter who wins or loses. They both maintain a neoliberal status quo. The biggest threat to them is Sinn Féin. So when Eoin O'Brien retweeted this Fine Gael politicians, Fianna Fáil, the Garda Association, the media establishment immediately jumped on it and said oh my god this is so offensive to the Irish police this is an. This is terrible. How could you possibly endorse a piece of art that compares the Gardaí evicting people violently today to British landlords evicting

people violently in the 1850s? So they tried to portray it as terrorism. They tried to portray it as something adjacent to terrorism. They want to violently overthrow the state, the Gardaí. They want to upset the apple cart with terrorism. So because of that everybody in the media and all of Ireland for a week have been talking about a painting. So before I speak more about the art side of things here are two major political things that are happening in Ireland right now. Here are two major political things that are happening in Ireland right now. An eviction ban has been lifted. I spoke about this a couple of weeks ago.

There was a ban on evictions in Ireland over the winter. Now that's gone. Thousands of people are going to be evicted from their homes and forced into homelessness right now. During a time when rent is the highest it's ever fucking been the rental market in ireland right now is downright exploitative you've got landlords kicking people out so they can turn their apartments into airbnbs which then takes those apartments off the rental market then you have the presence of vulture funds in Ireland. Giant faceless piles of cash that buy up loads of property just to profit from it in the rental market as an investment. This is happening because of government policy. It's happening because of the policies of Fianna Gael, policies of

Fianna Fáil. This is the single biggest election issue that threatens those two parties and makes Sinn Féin look desirable to people who would never have voted for them. So that's happening right now. Fuckloads of people are going to get evicted and the feeling is that the politicians chose property over people. Also what's happening is that the Gardaí, the Irish police, aren't happy with their working conditions, so they might go on strike soon. And there's a threat that they will go on strike next week

when Joe Biden is visiting Ireland. That is not when you want the police to go on strike in Ireland. So this painting, this artwork, because it's come along right now, has been turned into this massive political football. It allows the centre-right parties, Fianna Gael and Fianna Fáil, and their supporters to go, We love the guards.

How dare you portray the Irish police in this way. We love them. It's a great way to performatively tell the Irish police that you adored them using emotion at a time when you're afraid that they'll go on strike. Now it's worth noting they can't go on strike. The Irish police aren't allowed to go on strike but what they can do is they can ring in sick. It's known as blue flu in Ireland. Gardaí do like an unofficial strike where they all ring in sick that day which they're entitled to do but it does operate as a form of collective bargaining. So this piece of art, Spicebags art, is being portrayed in the media and by the centre-right

parties and their supporters as this deeply, deeply offensive piece of art which portrays the Gardaí quite unfairly as brutes and it's adjacent to an act of terrorism. So let's go back to the 1840s and the original artist Daniel Macdonald. Daniel Macdonald was an artist from Cork. He painted genre paintings in a realist style. I'd call it a dramatic realism. Daniel Macdonald, a very very accomplished painter and these are beautiful paintings, he would paint Irish peasants as he saw them with a layer of drama to it. It would have been in the tone of a French painter of the time called Jean-François Millet and Millet kind of was a pioneer of realism in painting. What was realism? In the mid-1800s in France after the French Revolution painters

started to paint real people, peasants, the workers, actual real people, because a revolution had happened. And they were sick of painting romanticism, which is, let's just call romanticism fantasy. Really simply, let's call it fantasy. And realism also rejected paintings of fucking popes and kings and princes. People were sick of looking at paintings of rich bollocks. So realism came around in France in the mid-1800s and painters like Millet said let's paint real people, let's paint peasants. So in Cork in Ireland we had Daniel Macdonald and Daniel Macdonald painted Irish peasants but he was painting Irish peasants at the height of the Irish famine.

Now, if you're from Ireland and you went to school in Ireland, you know Daniel McDonnell's paintings. Because they appeared in your history books. They appeared in your history books when we learned about the famine. You know that painting, Eviction Scene. You know it. You've seen it it you've seen it in your fucking history books that's why it's so powerful and that's why it's so dangerous to subvert it daniel mcdonald in his french realist inspired style painted the only painting in existence of irish peasants suffering during the potato famine most of my listeners aren't from ireland but

i don't want to get into the fucking famine some people don't even like calling it the famine they like to call it the genocide put it this way half the population of ireland disappeared through death and immigration millions of people died they died because of british policy they died because of years of disenfranchisement of the poor and the Catholic population. They died because of evictions. They died because they had no land. They died because they were so poor, the only crop that they could grow was a monoculture, the potato.

They couldn't eat grain because it was being exported by the Brits. Buying food was almost impossible because of these things called the Corn Laws that were enacted by the British Empire. The Corn Laws, they were laws that protected domestic agriculture by, it made grain really, really expensive, which was brilliant if you were an incredibly wealthy British landlord with loads of land and you were growing grain it was wonderful but if you were a peasant who was starving to death it was terrible because you couldn't afford grain so all you could eat were the potatoes that you could grow but there was a disease and this disease killed all the potatoes

so millions of people starved because of British policy. Also, the British, who controlled Ireland, had an extreme type of economic liberalism, laissez-faire economics, non-interventionism. You needed to let the Irish famine sort itself out. Don't start getting involved as the state. Don't get involved in it. Let it sort itself out so in 1847

daniel mcdonald from cork painted an incredible painting this painting was called an irish peasant family discovering the blight of their store and it's a barefoot peasant Irish family, dying, dying of starvation and misery. Macdonald took this painting and exhibited it in London, in the British Institution. What do you think the response was? Derision, silence. It was seen as vulgarity. It was threatening. The response by the British Institution to Macdonald's painting of the starving famine Irish in 1847

was a bit like what the media and the government are doing right now this week, the Spicebags painting, which is a remix of Macdonald's eviction painting. But Macdonald's 1847 painting of the Irish peasants dying in the famine held a mirror up to British policy. It said, this is what's happening over there. Now you have to remember, this is 1847, people don't have televisions, they don't have iPhones, they don't have colour print imagery. Photography was in its absolute infancy.

To show a lot of people in London, wealthy people who are going to art galleries in London, a very realistic painting of Irish people dying of starvation. The Brits were having fucking none of it. They went nuts. How dare you? We're trying to pretend that millions of people aren't dying in Ireland. And during that exhibition in London in 1847, almost as an aggressive response

to the painting that Macdonald presented. The favourite painting that year was another painting of an Irish subject, but it was called Irish Courtship. It was a painting by an English painter called Frederick Goodall, and it was a painting of these well-fed Irish peasants sitting around their cottage happily while a man sits on a barrel and tries to woo his love. A bullshit, harsh shit painting. A fucking lie. A colonial fantasy version of Ireland that appealed to rich English people who only saw Ireland as a holiday destination where they kept their absentee land and the local

indigenous people the Irish are seen as wild animals to be admired from afar and that painting was the favorite painting in the British institution at that exhibition that year because of Macdonald's painting of the famine was so offensive to them how dare you show us what's really happening give me the fantasy, give me the lie, paint a pretty picture of Ireland for me. Show me Paddy with his cap on. So that there's an example of how the painter Daniel MacDonald in 1847 was quite radical with his realism. Dangerous political art, very dangerous political art that challenged the institutions of British power to its core. Now we know who this painter is and what he does and what he did back then in the 18-fucking-forties,

let's speak about the painting Eviction Scene from 1850, because this is the image that's been remixed this week that everyone's chatting about in the media so daniel mcdonald then went on to paint eviction scene eviction scene is an incredible painting it's done again in the style of realism with a hint of drama to it and even i see rococo in there and rococo style shouldn't belong within realism as such I can see it in the way he painted the hills and the clouds but ultimately it's a dramatized realist scene it depicts an eviction it depicts an incredibly poor family there's there's a man a wife two tiny babies a little toddler on the ground who's too young to know what's happening. That's the saddest part of the scene for me.

The tiny toddler who hasn't a clue what's going on as his family's being evicted. Then there's a granddad and a grandmother. The grandmother is old and she has her hands up to heaven because she's getting near the end of her life. And she's pleading to God. So these people are being kicked out of their homes. That's happening on the left side of the painting. On the right hand side. You have two armed guards.

In the back. With a pitchfork I believe. No they've got muskets. And a truncheon. And then to the right of those two armed guards. Is a very well dressed manressed man in a top hat who's clearly the landlord and then to the very right of him you have someone who's not as well dressed as the landlord but more well dressed than the person being evicted. This person is the man,

the Irishman who works for the British landlord. This is the most interesting character in this painting he's on the far right of the painting. He's got one hand in his pocket to suggest that he's just been given money. His clothes are kind of in rags but slightly better like I said than the peasants. He has a stovepipe hat on but it's not as fancy as the landlord. This man is the petty bourgeois. He's a traitor. He's an Irish man who is taking money from the landlord to facilitate the eviction of his fellow countrymen and bow down to British power for his own greed. And if you look at how he's painted. He's painted like Judas is painted. In Leonardo's portrayal of The Last Supper. You know The Last Supper.

One of the most famous paintings in the world. Leonardo da Vinci. Look at Judas in that painting. And look at how Judas. How his head is turned away in shame. Well this dude in this painting who works for the landlord he reminds me of judas and i reckon that's a deliberate thing by the painter mcdonald who would have been familiar with leonardo obviously and this painting is 1850 and also as well remember

realism is inspired by the french revolution so what you do have in there you have fucking class structure you have class structure and power dynamics. You have the peasants at the bottom who are being evicted. You have the landlord in his finery at the very top. You have the guards who are facilitating the violence,

the ideological violence of the landlord and they're the ones who are carrying it out. And then in the middle, you have your petty bourgeois you have the Irish you have the Irish man who aspires to be the landlord but will never be that way and tries to behave like a wealthier person with his shitty stovepipe hat but ultimately he's selling out his own people so those are two paintings the one about the famine and then this one eviction scene by daniel mcdonald these are very powerful paintings in irish culture because like i said we saw them in our history books we all studied the famine in in history books when we

were in school and when you studied the, we remember the paintings of the families being evicted and the families starving. And the main painting of the families being evicted was this painting by Daniel MacDonald, which you can see in Crawford Art Gallery. The reason this painting is so terrifying now, so the artist Spicebag, like I said, he subverted this painting of the eviction.

And in place of those landlords, and in place of that petty bourgeois fella and the soldiers, he put the Irish Gardaí right now evicting people. The reason that fucking with this painting is so dangerous, and so radical, and so threatening to the fucking powers that be in Ireland that they're making a big deal of it the reason it's so threatening is because of where that painting leads in our education that painting leads to Charles Stuart Parnell and the land league with the housing crisis and the rent crisis that we have now in Ireland which is getting really fucking unsustainable that's getting so bad that the government are terrified of

a Parnell they do not want a fucking Parnell and they don't want any imagery that would make us think that we need a fucking Parnell. What Charles Stuart Parnell did, and again I'll synopsise this as briefly as possible, Parnell identified that there was a massive problem in Ireland in the 1800s with mass evictions, with the British owning all the land, with the utter exploitation of the regular people of Ireland to the point that they couldn't live quality lives. So he advocated for non-violent civil disobedience. Like land agitation and rent strikes. Everybody stopped paying rent.

Everyone. Every single person. Everyone, every single person. If the problem that we have in this country is that you all have a boat on your neck because of an exploitative rental market, Charles Stuart Parnell said to everybody, don't pay your rent. Everyone, fucking rent strike. But the way this country is going, especially with vulture funds, especially with large funds being the ones that people are going to be paying

rent to the possibility of widespread rent strikes that's something that might happen and that's a lot harder to control than something like a riot in fact i'd imagine they want a riot they'd love a bit of disobedience that they could portray as thuggery but the collective bargaining of everyone not paying fucking rent like Parnell did that is very scary and also they don't want the era of the famine to be compared to right now but the thing is to compare those two things isn't much of a stretch the similarities are the Irish famine and the current rent and housing crisis they're caused by policy they're caused by policy and people are dying of homelessness in Ireland right now but we do have a type of liberal

economics coming from the top down and ideological decisions if you want to know more about this listen to any of the podcasts that i did with rory hearn who's an expert on social policy and was very outspoken on this issue but basically the government aren't building social housing they're not doing it because they don't want to they've said they don't want to create ghettos the government are not the way that they help homeless people is by putting it to the private market they get hotels and they pay hotels loads of fucking money to put people into emergency accommodation which is something not designed to end homelessness but something that keeps people in perpetual homelessness so that their misery can be milked for profit

by people who own hotels. And also they're providing tax breaks for vulture funds. They're providing tax breaks for giant faceless funds of cash to buy all the property just for the rental market because this is an investment and there is billions and billions of money in Ireland. Money that's being made because our rents are so high. So is it a stretch to contrast the Irish famine with the current

housing crisis? Not too much of a stretch because both situations were caused by policy from the top down. They could have been helped by direct intervention. Both situations are being exacerbated by a refusal to intervene. Non-interventionist policies that are being led by liberal economic ideology. So it's not crazy to compare the two of them. Now let's talk about the role of the Irish police in evictions in Ireland. So, like I said, the eviction ban has been lifted. There's going to be tons of evictions.

We have seen there is evidence. We have seen there's photographs of the Gardaí, the Irish police, facilitating evictions that are violent, where people are injured. Prime example, Frederick Street, 2018. I would have spoken about this at the time. In Frederick Street, there was an eviction. Housing protesters said, no fucking way. What happened?

Unmarked vehicles, which is illegal, vehicles with no license plate, showed up. Thugs inicles with no license plate showed up. Thugs in masks with no identification pulled the protesters out violently. There's people today who are still injured as a result of it. The Gardaí

the Irish police were also present wearing balaclavas. What did they do? They didn't put their hands on anybody. They stood back the irish police stood back with balaclavas while faceless nameless private security kicked the shit out of people and violently evicted them from a property that's state violence there that is state sponsored violence that is placing the rights of property over people.

There's photographs of it. There's proof. It is documented. It was all over the newspapers. We saw that happening. What that is, is that's the willingness. That appears to be the willingness of the police to operate alongside a paramilitary force.

And it says, democracy stops when it comes to property. We will attend evictions and stand back and let the violence happen so long as that violence is against the protesters or the people being evicted. Last year when I dedicated a podcast to this when it happened the Irish, which is the paper of record, it ran an article that was quite sympathetic to small landlords and the issues that they face with tenants who won't pay their rent or won't leave the fucking properties. So this was a sympathetic puff piece written by the paper of record. In this puff piece, they had a paragraph where they quoted a landlord and a landlord i'm going

to paraphrase the landlord said we couldn't evict these tenants we went to the guardie the guard said we can't help you there's nothing we can do but as the landlord left the guard station a guard came out and unofficially gave him the phone number of a private security contractor. That contractor then showed up, evicted the tenants violently and stuffed one of their heads into the front lawn. So what you have there is, if the Irish Times, the paper of record is to be believed, a landlord said, I went to the Gardaí, they couldn't help, but they gave me the fucking number of a violent fucker who could do it illegally. This was then deleted from the Irish Times article. Deleted.

It should have been investigated. That was the most important and juiciest part of that fucking piece. The journalists should have said, I'm sorry, a member of the Gardaí gave you the number of someone who would perform a violent eviction that sounds like a law being broken right there this sounds like a scandal we need to investigate no one fucking investigated it was deleted from the bloody article and I'd love to see someone go back into that someone needs to go back and look at that and I don't think any reason was given by the paper of record as to why

they deleted this from an article. Other instances have happened that are similar. You speak to anybody who works within protesting for housing they'll tell you that they've seen that happen loads of times but we do have evidence of it happening once and this image of the Irish police who are supposed to be impartial in these issues, they're supposed to protect people. These images of the Irish police in Balaclava stepping back while a violent eviction happens. This photograph is what was placed in Macdonald's painting by the artist Spicebag. by the artist Spicebag. This piece of evidence is what was placed over the English bailiffs and the English soldiers.

And that's why it's such a big problem because you can't fucking argue with it. What makes Spicebag's intervention, his remix, so fucking powerful, you can't argue with this. There is no argument against this painting. He's taken evidence photographs of the Irish police with balaclavas on, facilitating a violent eviction, evidence, and just placed it over another one from the 1840s. That's all he's done

and then he stepped back. So the arguments of how dare you portray the Gardaí in this light what light is he portraying them in? What light? He hasn't done anything. He's taken a real image that exists of an actual thing that happened and recontextualised

it against a powerful historical image. I use the word remix. Remix isn't the correct word within art speak. Within art terminology the correct word is detournement which was a methodology that was pioneered by an art group called the Situationist International in the 1950s. Spicebag's piece is in the creative tone and spirit of the Situationists. They were a mostly French group, active throughout the 1950s up until the 1970s. And the Situationists, they sought to critique and transform capitalist society, which they saw as inherently alienating and oppressive and they didn't just

create art they created situations the situationists especially if i had a guy to board would have argued that capitalism causes us to be passive to be passive to to be passive, to not question, to just get on with it. And capitalism does this via the media, which expresses the dominant narrative, which the situationists would have referred to as the spectacle. This is what Spicebag has done by recontextualizing Daniel Macdonald's work. He has created a situation because the artwork isn't just this print. It's the conversation around it. It's how it's being portrayed in the media. Spicebag has seriously disrupted the dominant narrative.

Caused a crisis within that narrative. By using detournement. Detournement, again it's a French word word and this is a post-modern art form now we're going into the 1950s now. Detournement is when you get two pre-existing images or items that are pre-made two pre-existing things that separately mean separate things and then you place them together and they create something new through irony. I'll give you some very simple examples of detournement or things that are similar to detournement. Hip-hop music. Sampling. Within hip-hop music which is a postmodern art form, rap artists would literally take a funk song from the 1970s, take a little snippet

of it and then rap over it. They took something that existed already and that had meaning around it and emotional weight and then added something else to it and together through irony it created something new. A brilliant example of this and again i'm going to use a fucking real simple example um i'll take it from the 90s because the 90s was the height of detournement in pop culture the rapper jay-z jay-z had a song in 1998 called hard knock life real catchy song fucking brilliant you definitely know it because it was in 1998 it was one of the first one of the only rap songs in the charts in ireland so what jay-z did with hard knock life he sampled the 1940s musical annie the song from it it's a hard knock life jay-z sampled the song

that sounded like a children's song and he took this song and then rapped over it and his lyrics were about the harsh reality that he sees on the streets of brooklyn and those two things are completely opposed but when you mix them together via the tournament it creates a new meaning via irony and that feeling that you get is irony. The film Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino another real blatant example. Tarantino was a big fan of post-modernism and detournement. The scene in Reservoir Dogs where I think it's Michael Madsen. The scene in Reservoir Dogs where he chops off the policeman's ear. You know that scene. Everybody knows that scene. But here's why it was powerful.

That was made in 1991. By 1991, the average cinema audience had become completely and utterly desensitized to violence. Violence on screen didn't shock people anymore and we had been familiar with what violence looks like in cinema. It's bloody and it's scary and the music that accompanied violence was scary. Think Psycho. Psycho when fucking Norman Bates goes into the shower with the knife and you hear the strings think Jaws when the shark comes up and you have those that just that da da da da da da think Halloween with your man in the fucking ski mask Michael

Myers chopping everyone up and think of the Halloween soundtrack cinema audiences knew what violence was they loved violence they expected violence it was part of american culture and violence usually went alongside scary horrifying music and it no longer worked by 1991 so what the tarantino do i'm gonna have a fella chop off a dude's ear but the music isn't gonna be scary it's gonna be really catchy I'm gonna play that song stuck in the middle with you from fucking 1970 clowns to the left of me jokers to the right stuck in the middle with you I'm gonna play the audience the fucking catchiest song they've ever heard and it's going to bring back all these wonderful feelings of nostalgia. But while they're listening to it, this fella's going to chop off his ear and pour petrol on him. And now people were horrified. Finally, Tarantino had figured out,

how do you make people scared of violence again? You use irony, you use detournement, you recontextualise the violence. That's what Spicebag has done with his painting. He's recontextualised the power of Daniel Macdonald's painting by placing over it images of actual Gardaí performing violent evictions that you can't argue with. He's chopped off the policeman's ear but the soundtrack is wrong and now the establishment are actually confronted with the violence and they don't know how to react to it and I wouldn't say that Spicebag's work is post-modern so the thing with Detournament and those examples that I gave there like Tarantino for example that's postmodern

and there was an apathy to postmodernism postmodernism was about irony it wasn't necessarily about changing anything to want change was a bit uncool there was too much sincerity to that so postmodernism tended to just criticize but Spicebag's piece it uses the mechanics of postmodern irony Postmodernism tended to just criticize. But Spicebag's piece, it uses the mechanics of postmodern irony, but it has the sincerity of modernism.

It does want change. It wants social change. It has the sincerity of Fokamie's realism from the 1850s, and that's metamodernism. Metamodernism is when it's it's what now is it's when you have a mixture of elements of both post-modernism and usually the sincerity of modernism i am gone arty farty there but if you listen to this podcast if you're if you listen to this fucking podcast you know what modernism is now and you know what post-modernism is because I've spoken about them enough times. I'm going to make one final piece about this fucking artwork.

Why it's so important. Why I'm so excited about it. Why I'm so glad it exists. Why I'm thrilled to see the conversations it's starting. And the blind outrage that it's creating amongst establishment politicians and establishment media. So last night on television on one of the big current affairs talk shows, the artist Spicebag, he went on TV to defend his piece of work. He went on TV and who he was debating was a fellow who's an editor of the Irish Independent,

one of the big Irish newspapers. And this is the other Joy of Spicebags piece of art. It also borrows from meme culture. It was never displayed in a gallery. You can buy it as a print. But ultimately, it exists digitally on social media. And I've seen people change it and alter it. So it takes from meme culture too.

And the beauty of meme culture as an art form is it forever evolves. It's consistently, continually evolving. So Spicebag's there on this current affairs TV show. He didn't say much, but what he did say was really on point. He didn't say much, but what he did say was really on point. He didn't get overly emotional. And what he said about his art was, it's to highlight the intensity and cultural weight of an eviction in the Irish psyche. So this is an artist who knows exactly what he's doing.

He knows that everybody in the country is familiar with McDonald's painting from the 1850s. He knows that we've all seen that in school books he knows that we associate it with the land league this exists in our psyche and the editor of the Irish Independent who clearly doesn't understand what art is he doesn't because he said this man's art is political so if you say that you don't know what art is. To believe that political art is this separate thing, this separate genre, that means you think that art is decoration. If art was just decoration, it wouldn't be so important throughout history.

Art is political. Spicebag's opponent, who was the editor of a main newspaper, he just got really, really angry and didn't say much. He got real, real angry and tried to drag Spicebag into a corner by bringing up things that he'd said in social media and all this stuff. But mainly what the editor of the Irish Independent did. He engaged in the performance of outrage. He performed outrage. Because there's no actual argument against Spicebag's work. You can't argue with it.

He took an actual photo of Gardaí attending a violent eviction and just placed it over another eviction from the 1850s. There's no argument with that.D. attending a violent eviction and just placed it over another eviction from the 1850s. There's no arguing with that. None. And the editor performed outrage. By performative outrage what I mean is, do you remember getting in trouble in school? Do you remember getting in trouble in secondary school for something stupid, talking in class then your teacher your teacher who's in their 30s who really doesn't give a fuck that you were talking in class but has to give a fuck because it was their job do you remember your teacher would bring you outside and how they would adopt the posture and facial expression of someone who was really really angry because you've done

something wrong but ultimately you're not really angry pal you just have to do this you have to create the tone and body language of anger so that I feel and see your outrage even though you don't actually have a point the editor of the Irish Independent did that on television and it went mad viral. That clip went viral all day long all over the internet of him being performatively outraged and saying nothing and Spicebag just sat back and let him do it. At that moment that became a piece of performance art. Remember I spoke earlier about the situationists and how they would use the tournament to disrupt the spectacle. So now we're no longer speaking about a piece of art. It's not a print anymore. Now it's a situation.

That media appearance with Spicebag and the editor of the Irish Independence, that now became part of the artwork. That's now part of the art. It's a performance piece. This is the power of art. That's no part of the art. It's a performance piece. This is the power of art. The editor of the Irish Independent became a performance artist within this piece of art now. That's how powerful the work is.

And what the performance revealed is that this journalist was part of what's called the ideological state apparatus. And I'll explain that again because that's another phrase from another French person. The French are great at this shit. A fella called Althusser who's a philosopher.

So the Irish independent editor was there, outraged with no argument, defending the Irish police, defending landlords, defending evictions. What Althusser says is that the state has two dominant apparatuses to maintain the status quo, to enforce and maintain the dominant ideology of the ruling class. And these two apparatuses are the repressive apparatus, the repressive state apparatus that's police military physical force

and the ideological state apparatus that's religion education system and media now the thing is in the education system we'd already been told about dan Macdonald's painting and this had been presented to us in our education as these terrible awful evictions that happened in the past they were terrible isn't it so great that we don't deal with that now never again never again we received that as part of our curriculum as part of the ideological state apparatus. The state agrees. We've got Parnell Street. They're streets named after Charles Stuart Parnell. He's a fucking hero. The state agrees that those terrible, violent, repressive evictions in the 1850s were horrendous and terrible. They agree. And they agree that a painting like Macdonald is high art that represents this pain.

agree that a painting like McDonald is high art that represents this pain. Now you have to disagree with that if you're to critique Spicebag's work and you can't and by the editor of the Irish Independent just getting performatively angry but saying nothing. It showed us all what his emotion showed us all was the ideological state apparatus of the media would protect the status quo at all costs, even when it's clearly irrational and wrong. And that's what good art does. Good art, to use the cliche, holds up the mirror to society and says,

I'm doing nothing. Something ugly is happening and you're just looking at your own reflection I'm doing nothing here this is just art and it's what Daniel McDonald's work did in the 1800s with the British establishment and it's what Spicebag's detournament of that work did this fucking week and fair play to him and it's wonderful to see this discussion happening and the other thing weren't mentioning spice bags artwork he created this for charity he created this artwork for housing charities and for homelessness charities so if you'd like to buy a print of this piece of work which I think you should because even though it's a print and it's not a one-off something really historical happened with this artwork so if you

want to buy a print of Spicebag's artwork go to his Instagram spicebag.exe and he has the link to where you can buy a print of this artwork in his bio the website that he sells it on is called big cartel so if you type in spice bag eviction big cartel you might get it on google all the profits go to a housing charity and the beauty of this entire spectacle is that all it's doing is making this thing way way more powerful it's making this thing more powerful, this artwork. More people are seeing it. More people are hearing about it. And people are buying this print.

And money is going to a housing charity. I hope that made sense to you. It's very difficult to speak about art using an audio only medium. It'd be much better to be doing it while we're literally looking at these artworks. And I'm pointing at things and speaking visually. Also, this podcast, it helped me to reflect on... I think my artificial intelligence is becoming sentient. And I think I have three pets now.

I've got Napper Tandy and Silken Thomas. And Charles Stewart Parnell, the sentient artificial intelligence. So let's ask Charles Stuart Parnell. Charles Stuart Parnell, how do you solve the Irish housing crisis right now using simple bullet points? Okay. Increase government funding for social housing construction.

Address the shortage of available land for housing. Increase protections for tenants against eviction, particularly in cases where landlords are seeking to sell the property or raise rents. Implement rent controls to limit excessive rent increases. Provide financial assistance for first-time homebuyers, particularly those on lower incomes. Increase investment

in public transport and other infrastructures to support the development of new housing outside of urban centres where housing is more affordable. So that's from Charles Stuart Parnell, my pet artificial intelligence they all sound like sensible demands

they all sound like very sensible demands so before I sign off and if you're wondering if art is important or if art can create change the situationists who I kept referring to throughout this podcast because I contextualise Spicebag's work within situationism

they were instrumental in causing the student protests in France of 1968 which was a very important political revolution that spread beyond France and it was so powerful and impactful and frightening to the powers that be

that they stopped building public squares after that. New designs of cities. There's even, I don't know which one, I think it's NCAD but I'm not sure, but there's even an Irish university that was built after the French protests of 68 and they put a fountain there instead of a square because they were afraid of protests. The Situationists caused that. I'll be back next week. I don't know what I'll be chatting about.

Rub a dog. Hug a swan. Don't hug a swan, actually. Rub a dog. Admire the worms. Appreciate the bees. Fucking the dandelions. Don't mix bleach and cat's piss. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday apr April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm.

You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.