Bits, books, and bikes.

I won’t be surprised when Place de Juicy Couture supplants...

Sat, 05 May 2012 11:14:22 -0400

I won’t be surprised when Place de Juicy Couture supplants Place de Cartier.

I wasn't going to say anything about the Whitney biennial, but then I read this article.

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:24:05 -0400

I wasn't going to say anything about the Whitney biennial, but then I read this article.:

I belong to the Whitney. I went to the biennial last week. What I found was an exhausted building holding objects exhibiting the exhaustion of the art world.

It’s not as if our culture does not create beautiful, thought provoking things. I pointedly did not write above of the exhaustion of Western Civilization, of which I am an unrepentant admirer, but of the art world.

As I live my life, I regularly come in contact with human-made objects, designs, and experiences of beauty. The hand-made and the manufactured. The simple and the highly complex.

As this article argues (or perhaps asserts), the art world is not about art. Or beauty. I don’t know what it is about. It’s not about Ideas; the ideas embodied in the works, as announced by the Whitney’s tour leader, who I had the opportunity/misfortune to overhear, are facile in the extreme. To give the vast majority of these works even passing notice is to disrespect all of the other things in the world that are worthy of a little attention, of things that you might actually learn something from if you looked at them, listened to them, experienced them.

As is so often the case, it is the museum shop at the Whitney that is the most aesthetically satisfying part of visiting. Who knows, maybe the restaurant also has good food.

Returning to the building, I need to point out that it is basically a Postmodern Le Corbusier-ian anti-human monstrosity that looks more than anything like a prison and has the depressing air of an under-funded elementary school.

During my visit I had the misfortune of finding myself behind a couple of women in their twenties whose behavior seemed more in character for twelve year-old girls. They would simply not stop talking and did not deign to more than glance at the works as they glided through the exhibit. In retrospect, the murderous rage I felt toward them was unjust. They were experiencing this heap of works in way more appropriate than I was. I made the mistake of taking it seriously.

Score one for the curators and their ability to sucker me, at least for a while.

"There have been several leaps forward, adding wholly new dimensions to our basic finding. For one,..."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:01:30 -0400

“There have been several leaps forward, adding wholly new dimensions to our basic finding. For one, we found that willpower gets depleted not just by acts of self-control but also by other key things the self does: making choices and decisions, exerting initiative, perhaps planning and executing plans. This has led us to cast about for an even bigger umbrella than self-control, and it has gotten us into the interdisciplinary debates about free will. Some new work being published this year also showed that people suffer from ego depletion on an almost daily basis, outside the laboratory, and away from experimental manipulations, in the context of their everyday lives and normal activities. This has been a very welcome extension.”

- The Chocolate-and-Radish Experiment That Birthed the Modern Conception of Willpower - Hans Villarica - Health - The Atlantic

"At the service of their obstinately narrow, small ideas he has placed the authority and immense..."

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:57:46 -0400

“At the service of their obstinately narrow, small ideas he has placed the authority and immense erudition drawn from the papers crushed in his hand.”

- Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea.

This year’s winner at the Played-Out Verbal Tic Awards: “Really? Really?!”

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:46:30 -0500

This year’s winner at the Played-Out Verbal Tic Awards: “Really? Really?!”

Overheard: —I’m not much of a reader… Actually, I don’t like reading… At all. Can I...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:43:38 -0500

Overheard:

—I’m not much of a reader… Actually, I don’t like reading… At all.

Can I bring myself to get on the elevator with these guys?

“Discredited pseudoscience for au courant vanity.”

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:56:36 -0500

“Discredited pseudoscience for au courant vanity.”

Are they trying to instill a sense of Marcuse-ian alienation by...

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 23:22:36 -0500

Are they trying to instill a sense of Marcuse-ian alienation by putting the security gate between me and the collection, which is also “me” according to the signage. You are the clothes. You cannot have the clothes. Ergo you do not exist.

American Apparel has finally and definitively identified the...

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 23:17:09 -0500

American Apparel has finally and definitively identified the most vile sartorial artifact of the ’80s: the John Lennon/A Different World sunglasses. Wear these with some Glenn Close football-ready, shoulder-padded dresses and you are ready to go toe-to-toe with A View to a Kill era Grace Jones.

Brand gamification. I first encountered it several years ago as some neighbors argued about Ralph...

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 17:54:34 -0500

Brand gamification. I first encountered it several years ago as some neighbors argued about Ralph Lauren.

—Well, it was the best Ralph Lauren. Black label.
—No, there’s another one: purple. They only sell it at their best stores.

You know, the stores that the first speaker apparently didn’t go to, was unaware of, was too much of a brand n00b to be aware of.

I have a weakness for Burberry. I have an expensive cashmere scarf—which makes some people confuse me with some anarchist Occupy protester, the irony of which is not lost on me—and several coats and jackets. I’ve talked to the people who work in the Philly Burberry store, where I bought all of my Burberry items, and we’ve discussed the brand, and how in England it’s not a high-end brand, and in the U.S., or at least in Philly, you know that that middle aged woman wearing that Burberry coat is from the suburbs, from the Main Line probably. And we’ve talked about the different lines or closets or sub-brands or whatever that Burberry has: Prosorum, Brit, some others that I won’t dignify by looking up on the official Burberry U.S. web site.

My point is this: these brands have gotten to the point, whether it’s Ralph Lauren, Burberry, or gawd-knows-what-else, that you need a master’s degree in branding studies before you can figure out the damn things. It’s the Patrick Bateman, Americano Psycho-ification of consumption, egalitarian edition.

Free-range artisanality considered dangerous

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:08:12 -0500

If your “unique selling proposition,” if your strategy for saving your commodity product from oblivion, is intimately involved with imbuing your aforementioned commodity product with some conceptual or psychological or status-signalling benefit, you should take pause. You should take a long pause if that imbuation process—yes, I did, I think I did indeed just make that word up—yields a product that is completely indistinguishable from another product, a product you yourself make, that costs half as much money.

Yes, you know who you are, you retail establishment at 414 W 14th.

See a Pattern? Featured books at Three Lives & Co.

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:16:00 -0500

See a Pattern? Featured books at Three Lives & Co.

“Luxury Mattresses” on Flickr.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:44:39 -0500

“Luxury Mattresses” on Flickr.

Post Office, NYC

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:51:33 -0500

Post Office, NYC

"One doesn’t know what ought to astonish the most: the tyrannical madness that dared to order..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:44:36 -0500

“One doesn’t know what ought to astonish the most: the tyrannical madness that dared to order their construction, or the stupid obedience of the people willing to lend their labor to such edifices.”

- Vivant Denin (author of No Tomorrow), regarding the pyramids.

Annual New Year’s Garbage Can Ball Drop at 700 on Flickr.

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:40:20 -0500

Annual New Year’s Garbage Can Ball Drop at 700 on Flickr.

Use and abuse of reference in the arts

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:55:11 -0500

Everything is quotation, everything is a remix, nothing new can be said, and good artists copy where real artists steal. I plus or minus agree with these statements; I’m willing even to call them insights. But as insights, they’ve inevitably been mis-applied, mis-interpreted, and generally abused.

Assume that everything is simply a rehashing of things that have come before.[1] This does not obligate an author[2] to put giant quotation marks around every statement. In fact, the author has a responsibility to hide those quotation marks, to create a seamless, coherent work. The term work, what does it mean? A work is something that works:it is defined by its seamless coherence.

My favorite John Waters movie is Pecker, in which Edward Furlong plays a kid from Baltimore who gets swept up in New York’s art scene. Most people have not seen Pecker. Many more have seen the Family Guy episode where Chris, Peter and Lois’s son, is swept up in the same New York art scene. King of the Hill had a similar episode, where Peggy, Hank Hill’s wife, is recognized as an “outsider artist” after she fashions a human form propane tanks.

And also the Simpsons: Homer’s failure to assemble a backyard barbecue results in the dragged-from-his-car-bumper debris from the hapless attempt being…recognized as outsider art.

I apologize if there is a South Park episode that covers the same ground that I am leaving out. But my point is this: the writers of Family Guy, King of the Hill, and the Simpsons were clearly influence by this John Waters movie. Or John Waters was himself influenced by many of the same stimuli that motivated the above episodes.

I wish these episodes contained footnotes, pointing people toward Pecker, perhaps toward each other. Most artistic media are at a great disadvantage compared to the essay in that the demands of seamless coherence often prevent a reader (or a viewer or a listener) from becoming aware of each reference, each homage, each blatant theft, and thus denies them an opportunity to be expose themselves to the full richness of the world’s civilizations.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but my relationship with the two strains of philosophy I hold must dear developed as a child. First, Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos, exposed me to Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. Cosmos is Sagan’s a love letter to ancient Greek civilization , which embodied a curious, practical, mathematical, cosmopolitan humanism.

And the other strain I can credit my childhood friend Charles Weber, who introduced me to the Cure (the band) and to “Killing an Arab,” one of their first singles and an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger. His novel lead me to “The Myth of Sisyphus” which referenced Kafka, Nietzsche, and other writers which I dutifully pursued. Robert Smith, the motivating force behind the Cure, in an interview, mentioned Nietzsche, and that launched a love affair which opened me to Schopenhauer, Freud, and others.

That picking up my father’s copy of Cosmos would lead me to reading hundreds of books is easily foreseeable. That I had the good fortune of having a friend like Charles and that I happened to be in the music store and bought a copy of the 1990 Guitar Player magazine which had an interview with Robert Smith in which he discussed how Nietzsche influenced his thoughts on music composition and performance is an instance of dumb luck, of good fortune.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is among my favorite novels. But it was a dead end until I met someone who intensely disliked the novel. He explained that there was little new in it, that, for example, all the stuff about about tennis is…stolen from The Inner Game of Tennis.

I have no problem with this at all. What I have a problem with is that I didn’t know that and I had no way of knowing that, and that it’s only because I happened to strike up a conversation with someone on a Quizo[3] team named “Eschaton” and asked about DFW that I received in my face his blowtorch of invective against the novel.

I started writing about Family Guy because it represents all that is wrong with cultural recycling. The specific instances I cited above, where Family Guy is (probably) referencing Pecker is an exception to the show’s style. All too often, the show does not simply take a good idea and make it its own; it takes an idea, a reference, and cites it. The enjoyment is not intended to come from the content itself, but from the smug knowingness that it gives viewers “in the know.” I got that reference: I am sophisticated and learned. Even if the references weren’t to pieces of disposable pop culture detritus, this feeling is unjustified.

Art should humble those who experience it, not create or confirm an existing feeling of educated superiority. Family Guy panders, attempts to gain your love by flattering the viewer. It is not art but pornography.

Art should expand the view’s world, and not through tedious scolding but through the sharing of the beautiful and wondrous and sublime—in art, in history, in nature, in people.

Notes

1: Yes, this may or may not literally be true, as it implies that there is no first time for anything to be said, and we are forced into a form of cultural creationism. Jung’s idea of the cultural unconsciousness seems to be just this sort of account of the origins of culture.

2: By author I mean, in general the creator of a work. A painter, a film director, a graphic designer: these are all authors.

3: Quizo is a pub quiz game, started by Pat Hines and held at Fergie’s Pub and other bars in Philadelphia. There are legal reasons, apparently, why it is spelled with a single “z”. The spelling of “Quizo” bothers me to no end.

A tool for using people

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:11:00 -0500

Kant asserted that morality demands that human beings, being rational creatures, be treated as ends in themselves and not as instrumental, as mere means to an end. Klout represents a complete repudiation of this principle, as Klout aspires to help organizations identify those who “drive action” and therefore should be targets—objects—of organizations’ efforts to achieve their fund-raising, marketing, or public relations goals.

I don’t have in principle any objection to services that aspire to recommend things: Is this paper worth reading? Is this album worth buying? Is this movie worth watching in a theatre or should I wait for the video or give it a pass entirely? Klout’s goal is entirely different, focused on answering the following question, for a given person: Is trying to exploit this person worth your time and money?

Klout is to the social fabric as Groupon is to commerce. If you appreciate a business and want it to succeed, you don’t want them to use Groupon. Groupon’s clients are its victims. Similarly, Klout is trying to make a high score akin to a “Use Me!” sign on one’s chest. That some are complicit in their objectification doesn’t make it right, just more depressing.

I was thinking the same thing, but a little more categorically:...

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:41:48 -0500

I was thinking the same thing, but a little more categorically: I think I’m over thinking the universe gives a shit about anything I’m doing or taking pictures of or listening to or thinking. I deleted my Facebook account a few weeks ago, and I’m thinking about ditching the blog, Twitter, Path. It’s nice to have my thoughts to myself once in a while. Or not just once in a while but really unless I explicitly want to share with someone.

Christmas morning on the Art Museum steps.

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:15:13 -0500

Christmas morning on the Art Museum steps.