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Have I heard of “first-past-the-post” voting you ask?

This is actually a post about Fine Arts.

B R

B R

— 3 min read

April 5, 2023 | Sydney, Australia

After another engaging conversation with my host Robert - this one on the benefits of compulsory voting (e.g., you get a small fine if you don’t vote in Australia)1, I was off to the Museum of Fine Arts.

Robert: They have this terrible system in Britain called “first-past-the-post” voting. Have you heard of it?

Yes. Yes I have Robert. I am very well acquainted with the worst system of voting this side of the Holy Roman fucking Empire.

Anyway, there were great works in the Museum of Fine Arts, but starting my trip with stuff like the works of Diego Rivera might have put dessert first, as it were. Some big stand-outs though:

Like Auckland, there was what amounts to an homage to For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn - only instead of a six word fictional story, this represents “the 'disappeared’ children of the Stolen Generations - Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families in the 19th and 20th centuries by church and state” (Esme Timbery, 2008)

Australia has a vote going on about whether or not to extend some kind of sovereignty to aboriginal tribes and it appears to have split their Liberal (read: “actually kinda center/right wing”) party.

Weirdly enough, this piece is about Mexican history. That’s right reader, you can’t escape it. This is a work based on a painting by Edouard Manet of our favorite try-to-please-everyone Hapsburg, Emperor Maximilian, getting executed for the inevitable result of pleasing no one (Tom Nicholson, 2014)

Honestly I almost have some sympathy for Maximilian because there was zero chance he could please the conservatives that brought him in while not being a garbage-piece-of-shit royal. Like, if you are a good person somehow born into that role you are very likely fucked in the 1860s. RIP I guess. Is there a version of “RIP” where I’m actually not unhappy the person is dead?

So not only is this a cool-ass cartogram (money well spent on that degree in geography right here, remembering this term) based on population, but if you look closely it is actually in the style of a floor plan. I think the door size might represent total migration (in and out), but it could be something else.

Demographics are not destiny. Never be under some presumption that population by itself equals power, because the division of interests on national boundaries has only been real occasionally. This is why a small island that is a broom closet on this map effectively ruled the world for at about a century and is now rapidly falling apart as we speak.

I can’t put my finger on it but the top right imagery made me just stop and stare. I…love it? I don’t have the words to say why right now; ask me later maybe? Just look at it for a minute. A full 60 seconds. (Emily Floyd 2008).

You know, that ended up being a whole post. Let’s do the bike tour next time.

  1. I basically agreed it’s worth considering - if for no other reason that one particular party in the US might consider no longer trying to disenfranchise most of the voting populace, but that it wouldn’t necessarily solve some core problems with the overall structure (dual sovereignty (legislature and executive) is a recipe for disaster. ↩

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