The American Dream has become a Nightmare. We need a new paradigm for our economy.

Lets talk about post corporate and extreme capitalism life. How can new companies actually look. They would be based on a cooperative model of profit sharing and decision making and co-creation.

I used to do creativity workshops in businesses and there is possible a different paradigm in business based on Generative rather than Consumption Oriented Community. Companies as arenas for creativity and cooperation with an organizational structure that eliminates hierarchy.

And establishes instead a collaborative process of problem-solving, goal setting, personal growth and profit sharing, and profits that come back to the company. Capitalism needs to change if we are to survive.
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The visible difference between the corporation of the future and its present-day counterpart will not be the products they make or the equipment they use but who will be working, how they will be working, why they will be working and what work will mean to them.

Thinking about how our society, especially America has become so amoral in recent times, makes me realize that people are simply not spiritual and enlightened enough to live without religion. They need the laws to choose to do the right thing. But of course besides guidance and a certain safety that religion provides there is also the cult of the other, the different, which needs to to be vilified. So besides love, religion teaches hate.

Social media has become increasingly a new venue for amorality. For example before there were strip clubs that men occasionally attended but now porn is at the touch of your button with you every minute. It is much harder to fight temptation without external guidance and a belief in a Universe that does not condone porn...
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Maybe only a discovery of your own inner goodness and moral backbone is all there is for now.

H​I read a while back, when Norval Morrisseau, who in the 90's was the only Canadian artist known in Paris, was told by the National Gallery when he tried to donate a work, that he should try the Heritage Museum. Norval Morrisseau responded with, "I'm not dead yet".

The white man's guilt for being racists and general schmucks towards black and indigenous people is now causing a backlash of what I think stupid decisions. The point is to open up the art venues in Canada to be more inclusive and accepting of black artists and indigenous artists and women (yes still women are way behind in being included).

Instead they are creating separate venues for black artists and separate again for indigenous artists. Nothing for women artists.
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What this will create is an art ghetto situation, where once again the art powers at be will only show male white artists and they will contimue to dominate, while the poor second cousins will continue to be poor. And racism will continue as is.

​I don't know about you but I paint over my paintings regularly as I just can't afford new canvasses everytime I have a new idea. Then I usually say goodbye to the old one and proceed.
It occurred to me that, that is what Tibetan Monks do when they make sand paintings. They work for days to make a beautiful mandala with coloured sand, then at the end blow it all away.
A reminder of impermanence of life as we know it.

We have substituted FOOD FOR THE SOUL with FOOD FOR OUR GUT! The proof is in all the championing done in media and TV of celebrity chefs and 10 page spreads of recipes and people proudly identifying themselves as FOODIES.
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Yes cooking is also a creative endeavour and can be done in an artful way, but the end goal is still to satisfy the palette and the gut. Everything in life can be artfully done and everyone can be creative BUT only artist's goals are to uplift the soul, especially since formal religion is slowly decaying. Artists who were once celebrated in these same journals and media are now relegated to business course and wall decorations.

Our society has killed the soul by negligence and ignorance and thereby is killing art as well by supporting mickey mouse and pop art. Nothing remotely transcendent is being shown in galleries, unless it is being mocked.
We now worship not only money BUT our GUTS and possibly ABS as the proliferation of stuffy gyms takes over from walks in NATURE, where our souls could have been uplifted too.

We need to stop expecting that Canada will ever be homogeneous in life, culture or the arts. To say Canadian art is a fallacy, unless we mean world art. Because we have all arrived here from different worlds.

Canada is a multicultural country with many immigrants. I have never felt more like an immigrant then when I took a writing course at Ryerson in autobiographies. I happened to be in a  class with predominantly white women whose parents were born here but great great grand parents came from Scotland or England. Our first assignment was to write about a memory from when you were 4 years old and we were to share it next class.

Well, I was one of the end readers and listened to others who wrote about chimneys, lovely Christmases, toys and nicknacks on the mantles of their nana's place.
I wrote about how the KGB pounded on our door in the middle of night and dragged my grandpa away to prison for being a "kulak", a business man, terrifying all of us.

The other ladies were stunned into silence. No feedback for me...
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I dropped out of the course.​

As immigrants we all arrive with different past experiences. As artists we express those experiences and also the archival ones from where we came from. It is the childhood ones that last the longest.