The feminist cupcake sale that led to death and rape threats
If someone had told me, one week ago today, that a simple bake sale aiming to educate students about wage disparity in Australia would rile up a university campus to the point of death threats to the organisers, would reach media sources across Australia, the UK and US, and would result in the single most successful bake sale ever to be held on campus, I would have told them not to be silly; no one cares about a bake sale.
I also would have been wrong.
The now infamous Gender Pay Gap Bake Sale was an afterthought, a supplementary event to the panel discussions, workshops and stalls to be held throughout feminist week on the University of Queensland campus. We have hosted bake sales before, we just wanted this one to have an educational catch: why not educate students about wage disparity while feeding them sugar?
The idea was that each baked good would only cost you the proportion of $1 that you earn comparative to men (or, if you identify as a man, all baked goods would cost you $1). For example, for a woman of colour in the legal profession, a baked good at the stall would only cost you 55 cents.
Other university campuses and women’s collectives around the world have done it before – from campuses in the US charging more for white students than black students, to campuses in the UK only giving students the proportion of a cupcake they would earn in real life. This was not a new idea.
This particular bake sale, however, started something we could never in a million years have foreseen: a spiral into the darkest depths of gender inequality, the online world of cyberbullying and firsthand experiences of what women face every time they raise their voices.
Far from simply starting a discussion about wage disparity in Australia, the online backlash over the Gender Pay Gap Bake Sale brought to light hundreds of other issues of gender inequality, from sexual violence and threats against women, to why we still need feminism in the 21st century. This bake sale did its job and more.
We had students who had previously dismissed the idea of feminism approach us at the bake sale, purchase an item and explain that they “didn’t believe feminism was still needed until reading the comments posted online.”
These comments, posted by anonymous keyboard warriors (those who love to sit behind their computer screens and attack people changing the world) threatened violence against attendees and organisers of the bake sale, with posts including:
“I’m so glad I know this event is on, now I won’t have to sort through all the ugly chicks when I’m out clubbing cos they’ll all be at feminist week instead”
“I’d punch a chick if she winked at me at the bake sale”
“Females are fucking scum, they should be put down as babies”
“I want to rape these feminist cunts with their fucking baked goods”.
These comments were posted on the public event page, on subsequent posts about feminist week and sent directly to the email accounts, personal Facebook accounts and, in one case, via voicemail, of the organisers of feminist week, general members of the UQ Union Women’s Collective and to staff members who spoke out in support of the event.
This innocuous bake sale drew a vitriol of negative, derogatory and threatening online comments from people threatened by a discussion about equality and feminism; a discussion that we now, so obviously, need to be having in a public space.
As with all keyboard warriors, however, they never materialise in real life. The actual bake sale event was filled with positivity, support and enthusiasm for starting the conversation about wage disparity, the online behaviours of others, and, most importantly, global gender equality.
But while the keyboard warriors remained behind their screens, the threat to the safety and lives of women, the silencing of women in public spaces, and the wage disparity around the world are still very real issues that impact upon women and other marginalised groups in everyday life. These are the issues that the vitriol of online comments regarding the bake sale brought to light.
The bake sale may be over, but this discussion is just beginning.
And it all started because a couple of male students were upset that they would have to pay $1 for a cupcake.
Twenty thousand dollars, consisting of one hundred dollar bills, was presented as a simple sculptural object for auction through a fine art auction house in Sydney. The material/money for the work was sourced from a “New Work Established grant“ from the Visual Arts and Craft section of the Australia council for the Arts.
The currency used in the creation of the work was not altered or modified and retained its potential function and value as currency. However each hundred dollar bill had its serial number recorded to validate it as an authentic part of the work, thereby instilling a cultural value on top of the financial value. The tension between the economic value of the material against the cultural value of the art object was explored through the process of the financial transaction enabled by the auction.
The Great Contemporary Art Bubble
full documentry below: click on link to redirect you to page to play.
http://130.185.254.145/vids/the_great_contemporary_art_bubble_2009.mp4
Art critic and film-maker Ben Lewis spent 2008 following the booming contemporary art market, from its peak in May until its collapse in October.In this inside eye-witness journey inside the art world, Ben Lewis visits auction house, art fairs, galleries, and the homes of billionaires across the world, searching for the reasons behind the greatest rise in financial value of art in history. He interviews leading dealers, art collectors and art market analysts and discovered an extraordinary world of secretive deals, speculation, boundless enthusiasm for art.
Johannes Kreidler Composer
Foreign labor is called the composer of new music Johannes Kreidler (29) art action that he has hired a composer from China and an audio programmer from India to allow produce typical examples of its own music cheap.The starting point was a work commissioned for the festival Klangwerkstatt Berlin where on 7.11.2009 at 20.30 in Studio 1 of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Marianne Platz 2 in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, a new musical work of the artist is to be played. Instead it but even to compose something Kreidler has located the internet composers from low-wage countries, of which he completed according to the festival several pieces of music has let write that plagiarizing his own musical style. Thus, the production cost of the work commissioned significantly below the fee amount he himself pocketing.With action Kreidler addresses the global unequal wages and outsourcing in relevant countries with low wages, worked for comparatively expensive sold in western goods. With his art action he performs these mechanisms provocative and refrain from any seemingly conciliatory gesture that would contradict the economic reality. It also raises the question of authorship and copyright by linked to the culture of copying and Plagiierens, for just known China. The finished pieces Kreidler has its "foreign workers" bought, so that the entire work sector alone belongs to him and is reused by GEMA.
https://www.cardsagainsthumanity.com/sunlight/
Cards Against Humanity sold 30,000 boxes of literal bull poop
Cards Against Humanity just won capitalism. The risqué, irreverent “party game for horrible people” offered customers a very special deal on Black Friday: For just $6, they could get their hands on a limited-edition box of “bullshit.”
Eager to discover the truth of the box, a staggering 30,000 people coughed up the cash, and this week, the goods have finally been arriving. Turns out they really do contain bullshit—actual, real, honest-to-god bull shit.
Cue two dozen jokes about boxes of crap, shitty consumerism, not bullshitting, dirty deals, and so on.
There’s even video evidence of the turds that Cards Against Humanity is shipping its customers. Watch as this guy’s reaction upon unboxing his bullshit turns from disbelief to resignation upon realizing that yes, he really did just spend $6 on a piece of crap.