CREATIVE TIME: Christina Shih

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Christina Shih, American Cyberculture student at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Inequities

United States faces many health issues, from insurance plans to forty-four percent of adults becoming obese by 2030. These problems, unknowingly to many people, have some roots in the political and economical world. For example, the problem with trying to get many middle class families insured starts with the problem that insurance plans are too expensive and a lot of people cannot afford them. Digging deeper, you would find that many of the top officers and workers in insurance companies are making quite a lot of money and that some of these figures have ties in the government or actually work in the government also. This makes people wonder where the money that they pay for the costly insurance plans actually go to. While insurance companies claim that they are trying to make it so more people are insured, why are some of the top position holders in the companies making money in the one percent range. Another health issue, obesity, which is very different from the health insurance problem, also has to do with many government regulations. For example, Congress allows tomato paste on pizza to be counted as vegetable, saying that the tomato paste on pizza has enough nutritional value alone for children. This was done because tomato sauce is really easy and cheap to make, which benefits the government and certain food industries, in this instance, tomato farming industries. The inequity across the globe can be seen in many instances and all result in a disparity of wealth. In my cases, the government and the industries that work closely with the government are benefiting while leaving the average citizen suffering from these poor government regulations and choices.