My friend John Kennedy O'Hara, of Brooklyn, NY, has been called a "political street-fighter," a "mad dog," a "dissident." Among the incumbents who he tried to unseat in Brooklyn he was considered a troublemaker and a fool. He was also, it was said, a felon. When the district attorney called for his arrest as a "criminal voter" in 1996, O'Hara dismissed the charges as a joke. When he surrendered to the DA's detectives, they cuffed him and hauled him into central booking in his suit and tie - O'Hara was a lawyer at the time running for a seat in the New York State legislature - and walked him into a room of peeling plaster. They listed for him seven felony counts: O'Hara had allegedly voted from a sham address seven times in the early '90s, and only now, years after the fact, the cops were fingerprinting him with an old worn-out ink pad. Then they flashbulbed him for the mug-shot, and took him to a holding cell where the black kids who are central booking's main customers laughed when O'Hara told them the charge. "Lookit," the kids marveled, "they're lockin' everybody up."

If voting was the crime, O'Hara, 36 years old at the time, was a true recidivist. He was a "prime voter," in the electoral parlance, one of those citizens who votes not just in the big races for mayor and president but in primary elections and special elections and in obscure local elections for school boards and the like. He'd probably voted 50 times since he came of voting age, he was proud of the fact, and he was sure he'd never done it illegally. The courts concluded otherwise: He would end up with the honor of being only the second person in New York State history to have been convicted on criminal charges for the act of voting. To my knowledge, the only other New Yorker to achieve this status was Susan B. Anthony, in 1872.

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The encounter between artist and audience is far more ambiguous and problematic in the art world than in the entertainment industry in spite of about a half century of critical and art world exertions, for wholly varying motives, to minimize or eradicate that distinction. But drawing on the idioms of popular culture or the products of mass production for creative source material or inspiration is not the same as participating in it. The rise of the audience that regularly visits art exhibitions and the expansion of the art market itself is not the same thing, in either scale or kind, as the audience for television and movies. And just because the occasional Julian Schnabel or Dennis Hopper is able to move with relative success between the two worlds does not mean that the distinction between entertainment and art has ceased to have meaning. The membrane has always been extremely permeable, and hooray for that. But the intent and ethos of each are clear and distinct taken as a whole.

Simply put, when aesthetic purpose precedes exposure and sales, art plays the upper hand. When reversed, it's about entertainment. All the high priced creative talent in the world invested in a product formulated to perform in the marketplace does not add up to a lone artist maintaining the integrity of a single well conceived idea. For great entertainment I have no argument with $300 million spent on "Avatar." But it doesn't come close to the aesthetic depth and focus of Marina Abramovic's "The Artist is Present." The point is not the amount of money or labor that is invested, it's the nature of the engagement by both artist and audience.

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Last September, Fox News embraced a series of videos released by Andrew Breitbart that purported to expose ACORN, the national grassroots advocacy group, as fraudulently seeking governmental services for folks disguised as pimps and prostitutes. The ensuing rapid fire media reaction and the political firestorm it created drove ACORN to its knees, and it was quickly abandoned by its progressive allies, funders and supporters. All of this occurred long before the context and facts were investigated or evaluated, and the video "stings" were exposed as having been edited to misrepresent the alleged "facts" by both our independent report, "An Independent Governance Assessment of ACORN: A Path to Meaningful Reform", and the Public Editor's March 21, 2010 column in the New York Times.

The Shirley Sherrod incident that has played out in prime time this week has had all of the same elements and ingredients. The same conservative blogger -- Breitbart; the same network -- Fox News; the same kind of edited video -- again involving race. This apparently proved that the Department of Agriculture was engaged in illegal, fraudulent activities that were known and supported by NAACP and democratic and progressive leaders, including the Obama administration. This time, though, it backfired -- because the "victim" struck back immediately with the full facts, and the mainstream media gave equal time to her side of the story. As a result, the Obama administration and other democrats and progressives were forced to reverse their actions and rhetoric -- and admit that they had reacted to the first sign of political and media pressure without doing their own independent fact-checking!

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As David Poland correctly predicted just a week ago, Lionsgate has moved the newest Tyler Perry film, For Colored Girls, from its original January 14th, 2011 slot into the heart of the awards season. It will now open wide on November 5th, which is incidentally the same weekend that Precious (which Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey put their names on after the fact to insure a Lionsgate distribution) debuted in limited release, wracking up a record $108,000 per each of its eighteen screens. The film is a change of pace for Perry, as it is the first time that he is directing a film based on a prior source, the 1975 Ntozake Shange play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. The play itself is a collection of twenty poems dealing with various social issues (rape, abortion, etc) that are performed by seven women known only by a color ('Lady in Blue', etc). The cast is pretty huge, and includes a handful of Perry veterans (Kimberly Elise, Janet Jackson, etc), along with Whoopi Goldberg, Kerry Washington, Loretta Devine, Phylicia Rashad, and Thandie Newton making their debut in the Tyler Perry sandbox. To be blunt, nothing would make me happier than seeing a Perry film as a possible Oscar contender.