Author: Dish Staff

by Dish Staff

https://twitter.com/ouchytheclown/status/507222137443082240

The legendary Reaganite doesn’t see why loving Burning Man should affect his conservative cred:

Some self-professed “progressives” whined at the thought of my attending what they believed was a ghetto for liberal hippies. Yes, there was a gentleman who skateboarded without elbow or kneepads – or any knickers whatsover. Yes, I rode in cars dressed-up as cats, bees and spiders; I watched trucks carrying pirate ships and 30 dancers. I drank absinthe. But anyone complaining about a Washington wonk like me at Burning Man is not a Burner himself: The first principle of Burning Man is “radical inclusiveness”, which pretty much rules out the nobody-here-but-us liberals “gated community” nonsense. …

You hear that Burning Man is full of less-than-fully-clad folks and off-label pharmaceuticals. But that’s like saying Bohemian Grove is about peeing on trees or that Chicago is Al Capone territory. Burning Man is cleaner and greener than a rally for solar power. It has more camaraderie and sense of community than a church social. And for a week in the desert, I witnessed more individual expression, alternative lifestyles and imaginative fashion than …. anywhere.

Kevin Roose talked to Norquist at the festival about why it’s “a natural place for free-market libertarians”:

Norquist believes Burning Man’s popularity among “high-tech, pro-growth” elites says something profound about changing attitudes toward state supervision. He also thinks the festival is wrongly caricatured as a hippie drug den.

“The expectation that there’s a cross between absentminded professors and bohemians and that’s what artists are, it’s not true,” he says. He gazes down the road at a gigantic bus that has been decorated to look like a pirate ship. “Look at the amount of work that goes into building something like that! That was not done by lazy people. That was not done by people who think the world owes them a living. Or people who say, ‘Let’s pass a law to build a boat.’”

In the long run, Norquist thinks that the high-profile regulatory struggles of tech companies like Uber and Airbnb could help the GOP attract young Silicon Valley voters if it positions itself as the innovation-friendly party.

But Denver Nicks disputes Norquist’s takeaway that Burning Man operates “on the principle of self-reliance without a lot of government intrusion and with few rules”:

H]ere Norquist’s understanding of Burning Man falls apart. You’re only really self-reliant insomuch as you bring in enough water and food (likely purified and inspected for safety by U.S. government agencies) to last for a week or so. And the government is everywhere at Burning Man, since the whole time you’re dancing or body painting or riding an enormous flame-spitting octopus or whatever in a landscape protected from spoilage by the Bureau of Land Management. And Black Rock City actually has lots of really important rules, like not dumping water on the ground and not driving. There aren’t persnickety rent-a-cops running around staking out potential litter bugs, but rules are enforced by Burning Man Rangers and more directly by the community itself through feelings like shame, withholding participation in taco night at camp or giving you a terrible “playa name” like Moophole or something.

by Dish Staff

The current Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney is leaving many critics cold. Jed Perl describes the exhibit as “a succession of pop culture trophies so emotionally dead that museumgoers appear a little dazed as they dutifully take out their iPhones and produce their selfies”:

Presented against stark white walls under bright white light, Koons’s floating basketballs, Plexiglas-boxed household appliances, and elaborately produced jumbo-sized versions of sundry knickknacks, souvenirs, toys, and backyard pool paraphernalia have a chilly chic arrogance. The sculptures and paintings of this fifty-nine-year-old artist are so meticulously, mechanically polished and groomed that they rebuff any attempt to look at them, much less feel anything about them.

Perl argues that Koons has failed a tradition of anti-art pioneered by Duchamp:

The Koons retrospective is … a multimillion-dollar mausoleum in which everything that was ever lively and challenging about avant-gardism and Dada and Duchamp has gone to die. I am aware that some people embrace Koons because they believe his armor-plated work is a necessary evil, the tougher and cleverer product that art must become if it is to survive. Of course they see that Koons has put the readymade on steroids. But that, so the argument goes, is what is needed to give Duchamp’s nerdy anti-art a fighting chance in our media-mad world. However persuasive it may seem to some, this argument, which is pure art world realpolitik, has the effect of shutting down the discussion we really need to have, which is about the ideas and (dare I say it?) the ideals of the Dadaists, and the significance of anti-art a hundred years ago and its potential significance today. Frankly, I wonder if those who hail Koons as the high-gloss reincarnation of anti-art really know what anti-art is all about.

Eric Gibson, harsher still, suggests “too little attention has been paid to Koons’s five-year career selling mutual funds and commodities on Wall Street in the 1980s. It is the key to understanding his art”:

[I]t is Koons’s signal achievement to have created a wholly new kind of art, one immune to all forms of judgment save that of the marketplace. Trashy? Sure, but it sells for millions—sometimes tens of millions—and there’s no reason to suppose it won’t continue to do so. That’s all that counts. Koons has succeeded by emptying his images of everything except the cheesy, the easy, the sweetly appealing, and the familiar. His works are big, they’re cute, they’re shiny, and they make no demands. What do they mean? What do you want them to mean? Something for everyone. They aren’t there to be pondered or engaged with in any significant way. They exist solely as emblems of value.

This, in the end, is why Koons’s work looks so out of place at the Whitney; it doesn’t belong in an art museum. Its proper venue is the sale room, the commercial gallery, or even the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, places where, with all aesthetic pretense cast aside, it can stand forth fully and unequivocally in its true nature as a high-priced, tradable commodity.

Barry Schwabsky also sees an artist suited to the current economy:

Scott Rothkopf, the curator of the exhibition, points out that the first review of Koons’s work had already pegged it as “a commentary on the glamour of conspicuous consumption.” This is what separates Koons from Warhol, who, in an era when CEOs made about twenty times the average worker’s salary (rather than nearly 300 times, as today), saw consumerism as a force that leveled social distinctions. “The richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” he said. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.” Koons, by contrast, has perfected the art of taking the same crap on offer at a big-box store—be it an ordinary pail or kitschy figurines—and making it better than anything you could ever own, so that the buyers of his art might feel superior to the plebs without having better taste than they do. “True, this might be possible only in an era of increasing inequality,” Rothkopf admits—but forget it, just enjoy, have a slice of gilded cake.

(Photo by Flickr user Kim)

by Dish Staff

Critics are raving about Ben Lerner’s new book, 10:04:

Like Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 is a conceptual novel of sorts, by which I mean that it takes what it wants from any number of genres (fiction, poetry, art criticism, autobiography) and corrals the results under the roof of “novel.” Readers and critics less familiar with this approach may spend time wondering about the novel’s taxonomy; those who regularly read and love writers such as Édouard Levé, Hervé Guibert, Violette Leduc, Eileen Myles, Marguerite Duras, W. G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Fernando Pessoa, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Roberto Bolaño will likely take 10:04 on its own terms, and appreciate its autofictions, its elegant structure (its action is bracketed by two superstorms, 2011’s Irene and 2012’s Sandy), its meticulously constructed sentences, its deployment of poetic tropes (parataxis, refrain, dialogue that floats and rushes, semantic and syntactical leaps that treat the reader like a grown-up), and its facility in analyzing a wide range of political, cultural, and aesthetic artifacts, from Ronald Reagan’s speeches to artist Christian Marclay’s The Clock to Donald Judd’s sculptures to the ’80s hit comedy Back to the Future (from which the novel’s title derives).

Maureen Corrigan calls the novel “mind-blowing,” appreciating that the plot “is way out of the box”:

When 10:04 opens, our narrator and his agent are celebrating at an expensive restaurant in Manhattan. There, they ingest baby octopuses that have been literally massaged to death by the chef. Our narrator tells his agent that he plans to expand his story into a novel by “project[ing] myself into several futures simultaneously … [by working] my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city. …”

That, of course, is also an overview of 10:04 itself, the hyper-aware novel Lerner writes for us. Bookended by two historic hurricanes that threatened New York City (Irene and Sandy), 10:04 projects our narrator into several possible plotlines. For instance, he receives a diagnosis of a serious aortic heart valve problem as he also consents to be the sperm donor for a close friend who yearns to have a baby while he also leaves town for a writers’ retreat in Texas. Lerner’s dazzling writing connects and collapses all these storylines into one.

The effect is thoroughly contemporary:

If fiction, as William H. Gass once wrote, is in the business of creating a reality rather than reflecting one, the reality Lerner creates takes the form of collage, a collection of moments that, in combination and repetition, are recuperated by narrative almost accidentally. It’s like the phenomenon of pareidolia, he suggests: the brain’s tendency to make meaning even among randomness, seeing faces in the clouds.  At one point, Alex and the protagonist view Christian Marclay’s The Clock — a twenty-four-hour video montage composed of found footage involving time, by means of which “fictional time [is] synchronized with nonfictional duration.” In its assemblage of “found” text, 10:04 too is written, as it were, in “real time,” both fiercely contemporary — global warming, iPhones, and Wikipedia articles as more than just set-dressing — and a form of time travel, fusing the now of the reading onto the now of the text.

Admitting that “it’s hard to describe a Ben Lerner novel to someone without it sounding kind of terrible,” Emily Temple hails the book as a “meta-fictional masterpiece”:

This novel, which is so much about literary creation and reflection, also feels like the way the mind works: in patterns, in dialogue, in mirrors. Lerner returns again and again to the idea of the world “rearranging itself” around him to allow for new information, new perspectives. We return again and again to certain moments, viewing them through various veils of fiction, of fraudulence. Lerner’s narrator meditates on time flux or lack thereof (the title refers both to Christian Marclay’s The Clock and Back to the Future). The book swirls in on itself, like our minds do. It gets stuck on things. It gets unstuck. It worries. You may not think you need a book to worry for you, but it’s a surprisingly pleasant feeling.

Christian Lorentzen is on the same page:

This is a beautiful and original novel. Lerner’s book is marked by many reminders of death and dying: Ben’s faulty aorta, the ecological turmoil suggested by two superstorms. But 10:04’s prime theme is regeneration, biological and artistic, and it signals a new direction in American fiction, perhaps a fertile one.