Chapter 3:
"We are taught that history is made, and changed, by leaders. This is partly true: leaders often providethe skills, perspectives, examples, and charisma that are necessary for social movement. But it is people who make up those movements, and if change is to be far-reaching and sustainable, then all of us must be the movement. The mark of a good leader is to train others lead, give them the tools to succeed on their own, and then get out of the way."
- A good and strong leader are how movement begins. Issues begin when people that are part of the movement tries to stir away the path the leader was setting. That's when the movement begins to fall away, a leader is the foundation of a movement and can't be over-shadow.
"We need symbols, they are a way of making groups, causes, messages, and ideas less abstract, more visible, and easier to convey. But symbols are slippery: they can and will be interpreted differently by different audiences. We need to be aware of how the words we use, the images we employ, and the performances we stage will be made sense of in various contexts. Our opponents can consciously manipulate our symbols for their own ends, and we need to operate with the assumption that they will."
-Symbols and wording are extremely important for movement and activism. However, opposing sides tend to take symbols and meaning and spin it in order to make the movement look bad. For example "To the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is a chant many use in the support for Palestine. However, people who are in the support of Israel had spin the chant and started to call it "antisemitic". (Ironic from them cause Arabic is an Semitic language and people are willing to demonized easily.)
Chapter 4
"When Malevich first displayed "Black Square", he hung it in the very place usually reserved for the Saint. His art worked politically because, like all good artistic activism, it spoke from and to the established church, "Black Square" was pretty punk rock (as was Pussy Riot's performance in the main Orthodox Church in Moscow almost a hundred years later), but the profound politics of the painting go beyond its blatant oppositional positioning."
-The Black Square that Malevich had painted is still being used as art activism til this day. During the BLM movement, people had posted a Black Square in support of BLM and the many injustices.
"Art is powerful. It's a way we can express our understandings of
the world as it is, and articulate our visions for how it could be, In this
way, all art is political, whether the artist intends it to be or not. And a
great deal of art is politically conservative, reflecting and expressing
the worldviews of those who are best placed, politically and econom-
ically, to patronize the arts and determine standards of competence
and beauty."
"Art will always have a meaning, intentional or not. What artist creates are always based around the scenery, cultural/historical events, or by the people that pays them to do it. There's always contexts to paintings and drawings even if the artists meant it or not.
"The Disasters of War" is a series of artwork created by the early 1800s Spanish artist Francisco Goya. The artworks was based on his experiences during the Spanish people's uprising against the French occupation. Each piece of his work shows the horrors that Goya saw during war. The art series does not hold back in the brutality of war that are meant to shock and move his audience.
"Cut Piece" is a performance art y Yoko Ono held that the Yamaichi Concert Hall. In the performance Yoko Ono sits on the stage and the audiences are given a task of cutting small pieces of her clothing with a pair of scissor. The purpose of the performance and pieces of clothing was a way the audience was supposed to remember their experience and a term of endearment. Instead, the audience began cutting bigger and bigger pieces of her clothing and began to cut just to cut. One man in the audience cuts off majority of Yoko Ono's clothes just for the fun of it, leaving her to hold her bra in order to cover herself. Someone in thw audience even tells him to "knock it off". The performance shows how people will take advantage of anything and anyone if there's no "consequences". The performance is a hard watch honestly, it reminded a similar but more brutal performance piece called "Rhythm 0" by Marina Abramovic, which is just as painful and disgusting to see and learn about, showing how people would do anything to someone who let's themselves be vulnerable.
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