"Do you think," said Candide, ''that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?" - from Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759) by Voltaire The 2009 California College Of the Arts' MFA exhibition was both optimistic and sober. In a post-9/11 world wracked by war and ecological disaster, increasingly depersonalized by state surveillance and the pervasive influence of the Internet, making art becomes a way to both confirm one's humanity and to make sense of it.... Read More