Our project Oro en paz y fierro en guerra is currently on display at The Art Gallery at San Francisco State University. The show If Elvis Presley Was The King, Who Was James Brown? will run until September 25, 2014.
To celebrate the outing, we are releasing today the concluding artwork in the series, titled Some Gentle People There, also known as the Master and Servant dialectic.
It looks like this:
COLL.EO, Some Gentle People There, 2014
This particular piece was inspired by the following passages in Enrico Moretti's latest book, The New Geography of Jobs (2012) published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:
In general, job opportunities in the U.S. labor market as a whole have been concentrated in high-skill, high-wage jobs (professional, technical, and managerial occupations) and low-skill, low-wage jobs (food service, personal care, and security service occupations). Job opportunities for middle-wage , middle-skill white-collar and blue-collar workers have declined sharply. [...] Jobs that today look more like art than labor will eventually become commodified, standardized, and mechanized— they will lose their luster, and their numbers will start to shrink.
When I visited the latest high-end handcrafted cloth maker to open near the Levi’s factory, the irony of the situation was inescapable: in the same place where only twenty years ago undereducated Hispanic women used to cut and sew Levi’s garments, there are now dozens of overeducated young white people cutting and sewing similar products. [...] This is a world in which the iPhone is designed and engineered in Cupertino by Chinese or Indian PhDs and native American workers are the waiters, carpenters, and nurses who support them.
In short, enjoy your next disruption.
The full series, including Some Gentle People There, can be seen here.