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One of NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman's repeated themes is the idea that global capitalism will lift all boats. As he puts it, "No country with a McDonalds has ever fought a war with another country with a McDonalds." Forget that the work is demeaning and the food is crappy. Since 9/11/01 he's been embarrassing himself in print with great regularity, trying to reconcile his "we are the world" thesis with the need to show Muslims who's boss. He's also been weighing in on the exporting of American jobs, which of course he thinks is great, and today he's come up with a clever name for the "new class" of Indians who are getting an increasing chunk of American white-collar work. The hokey neologism shall not be repeated here lest it add to his meme-pool cred, but here's a modest prediction: that it will end up being used, not like he hopes--as a cutesy way of understanding and relating to the people taking our jobs, sorry, our fellow laborers, across the Pacific--but as a term of derision by the so-called "protectionists" he hates. God, if only.
It's funny that a fresh kind of appropriation theory is thriving on the Internet, what with the ease of copying and mashing-up sound and image files, while the gallery world seems doomed to repeat the tropes it already knows--with only conspicuous "value added" labor as a selling point. I haven't see all this work in person, but here's a few examples of this bad recycling of content in the art world: (1) Sharon Core at Bellwether, who meticulously photographs baked goods in the identical set-ups of famous (but basically lame) Wayne Thiebaud paintings (Thiebaud was always a prettied-up, calendar art version of Pop, and Core appears to be making a calendar of the calendar); (2) Dan Fischer, who does finicky pencil drawings of famous artists posing with their work (or in the case of Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and a few others, drawings of the works themselves); and (3) Sharon Lockhart, who's suddenly, inexplicably devoted to the art of Duane Hanson.
In all of this work, we're not talking Sherrie Levine rephotographing Edward Weston, or Elaine Sturtevant researching methods and materials to "repeat" Warhols, Stellas, and Beuyses, both of which projects were touted as critiques of male authorship and prerogative in the art world. (If it is that, it's about 20 years behind the discourse.) Nor is it anything as relevant to current technological practice as the theory around sampling or what Rick Silva calls "uploadphonics." No, it's apparently just an advanced form of fan art, as well as collector bait--if you can't afford a Thiebaud or a Gonzales-Torres or a Hanson, here's the next best thing. And the craftsmanship--ooh, to die for.
Whoops, still tinkering with a post about new "appropriation art" in the galleries. If you got notified by email, sorry, I should have the text back up soon. [UPDATE: Here it is, severely pared down.] In the meantime, here's a nice image by SquareWave:
Follow-up to an earlier post about Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Dance Music: Did I forget to mention the guy is funny? Below are some examples of his Lester Bangsian blurbs explaining different genres*:
Acid Breaks! This and Chemical Breaks (and Big Beat, I guess) are the most favorite genres of action movie trailers, sports highlight reels, corporate powerpoint presentations, and spastic TV ads featuring people doing something extreme like driving really fast while birdwatching. I can't listen to this anymore without getting silly images in my head of jumping in the air, pausing while the camera pans around me, and then resuming kicking some guy in the head. This is part of the "electronica" wave of mainstream acceptance in the late '90s.*...which had to be retyped--note to all using Flash or the like: those formats are good for some things, but no one will ever quote you or find your words through a search engine on the Web if you hide them in the stinky folds of a proprietary format. Simple html pages are the way to go.2 Step Garage. God, this stuff is so fucking boring! Retaining the idiotic basslines of Speed Garage, the hiccuping staccato beats of that derivative Top 40 schlock that dares call itself RnB, and even worse: the endless crooning by "guest" popstars (hence all the "featuring" accolades in playlists), divas, and whiny narcissists who like to think of themselves as just too damn cool to be listened to by you. The only good thing about 2-Step is, unlike Speed Garage, it won't be used by invading alien armadas to their high councils as grounds for turning the Earth into a giant ashtray. [This is mostly true but expect a mix of "good" 2-SG on this page soon. --ed.]
Hard Acid Techno. Here we go: the genre that reveals all the awesome destructive power of the little silver box [Roland TB-303, dispenser of the squelchy "acid sound" --ed.]. Hard as fuck acid techno. Acid that'll kick your ass so hard you'll be shitting shoes for a month. This is the kind of music everyone listens to before doing something destructive. Sports teams listen to it before a big game, politicians listen to it before a speech, armies listen to it before they go to war, kids listen to it before they clean their rooms. I bet God was listening to it before he made humans.
Robert Rauschenberg interviewed in the NY Times, Feb. 15:
Are dinner parties as good as they used to be in the bohemian '50s?
Of course not. The art world isn't interesting anymore, because when I lived in New York, the problems in the art world were my fault. But they no longer are. They're the fault of dealers, who are influencing the quality of art.
Reading that, many artists will say "Right on. F-ing dealers, they pick the shallowest work." But one could just as easily say "C'mon, Bob, like you and Jasper weren't jockeying for position back in the day. Whether something was 'your fault' wasn't an issue until a dealer put it in the pipeline." He's right about the dinner parties, though: Bohemia isn't as freewheeling in New York now. Everyone's juggling art and day jobs. Plus people can't smoke. It's still the best art town, though.
Heads of David Koresh, from Mark Allen's weblog. The New York & Toronto perspective on the interactive computer game these came from is here; my photos of the heads in action accompany this post of Allen's about the Davidians' New York debut.