Police and the Private

Kind of look like an army of thoughtless robots, don't they?

How ironic that the very cause for which the CAE was fighting for was also the cause that brought Steve Kurtz to be considered a terrorist. He was trying to make science easier to understand, to make it so that it's not just the intellectual elite that understands it. Sadly, this was obviously not accomplished, and the police that came to his house saw chemicals and automatically assumed that they are dangerous and that Kurtz was planning some sort of terrorist attack. Even when the FBI, an organization who one would hope has more knowledge, didn't know what to do other than trash his house.

Aside from the drama associated with the investigation, I found the idea of his Art Ensemble to be very interesting, and introduced yet another perspective I had never thought of.

• I don't know why I never considered this, but why should art be created by only one person. It is entirely possible that three people work better together than each one individually, and I'm not talking about faster or more dilligently; they would inspire each other, push each other to think more critically, and generally do more than one would ever do individually.
• After considering this idea of collectives, I realized that we do live in an extremely individualistic society. As was put in the article, if a group of artists make better art than just each one individually, they will not be accepted. The odd thing is that collectives are rejected by most. On one side, being an individual is respected; these are the people that express themselves and are generally unlike other people. The other side of the coin entails mass culture; this is the idea that people will follow what others do and say, it is a sort of collective, but unlike the ensemble that Kurtz is part of. It is kind of like we stray away from the true potential of the ensemble.