Vocational Self-Portrait

Build, baby, build.

Franklin Einspruch, Vocational Self-Portrait, 2025, unsized, digital (SVG), ©FE

Last night in an online meeting of FAIR in the Arts, the moderator asked the proverbial room whether people were feeling optimistic or pessimistic about the current state of affairs. Some artists are reporting the well-founded and prudent need for continued vigilance against the anti-liberalism of woke ideology. The phenomenon of cancelation persists, and one teaching artist talked of a recent training offered to his colleagues on how to introduce transgenderism into educational programming intended for students as young as six.

But the overall mood was buoyant. Trump has routed DEI government-wide. Ibram X. Kendi, whose writings I likened to Hitler’s five years ago, is leaving Boston in disgrace. The Biden administration’s effort to establish an information control network is thwarted once and for all. (To them who complain, “Nobody elected Elon Musk,” I reply, “Nobody elected Nina Jankowicz.”) USAID, which among other things¹ sponsored a “DEI musical” in Ireland and a “transgender comic book” in Peru, was just defunded, dealing a severe blow to the spread of regime progressivism via propagandistic art. NPR, an endless font of bias and condescending smarm, may be next. Revealed preferences at the arts funding bodies have long indicated a 10% cap on straight white male recipients; the associated politics are now so widely reviled that I may start applying for grants again.

Many good people with progressive sympathies have been caught up in odious and cynical projects over the last several years and are looking for an opportunity to step back into the light. Even if they haven’t flipped all the way into libertarianism or conservatism, they want progressive politics based on reason, principles, and fairness, and realize that their leaders haven’t provided them. We will be dealing with the diehards for a long time, but as previously noted, I think we could be coming out of the worst of it, and new possibilities lay ahead.

The publication of Aphorisms for Artists is one of several outstanding (in the sense of long-neglected) projects I’ve been meaning to complete. With that accomplished, I’m moving on to others. Some of them will take years, but they’re more or less mutually reinforcing. One of the easier but more urgent ones is to escape the technical debt built into https://franklin.art which has obliged me to use Substack as a portfolio site for my recent work.  For the redesign, I wanted to create an image that would reflect my current style, my commitment to painting, my interest in writing, and my fondness for gardening and the outdoors. I have been fascinated by the possibilities of Scalable Vector Graphics ever since my Fulbright project and want to incorporate them into the redesign as well.

Hence the above. I intend this to be a year of constant creation. I hope you’re feeling inspired to do likewise, whether in spite of current events or because of them.

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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.

1. Including funneling millions of dollars to Politico. Strangely, days after the White House furloughed all USAID employees, Politico missed payroll for the first time in the company’s history. They insist that this was coincidental.