The Dish

by Dish Staff

Dan Piepenbring close-reads an automated blog comment with fascination:

If you give it your name it will call you by it when you start up the GPS. These incidences come about quite normally, showing that Peter dislikes his daughter. A huge clue that your ex boyfriend still has feelings for you. —geniadove

That swerve at “Peter dislikes his daughter”—whoa! Dissertations have been written about less. And to see a clinical phrase like “These incidences come about quite normally” next to a casual one like “A huge clue”: What does it all mean? The mind searches restlessly, somewhat desperately, for connective tissue, some semblance of conventional narrative. Like autostereograms, these comments always verge on resolving into a discernible whole; unlike autostereograms, they never do.

He goes on to consider spam as part of a literary tradition:

[T]here are a number of literary antecedents here: found poetry, Dadaist ready-mades, collage and bricolage, cutups, aleatoric poems, various Oulipo shenanigans. Most especially, there’s spoetry, spam lit, and flarf, similar movements from the past two decades that have made poetic hay from the Internet’s endless detritus. Flarf descends from Gary Sullivan, who collaborated with other poets online, constructing abhorrently bland poems from the results of random Google searches, workplace memos, Associated Press stories, and the like. (“awe yea You see, somebody’s done messed up / my latvian women’s soccer team fantasy REAL bad, / oh pagers make of cheese,” goes a representative sample.) …

I admire the impulse behind spam lit, and I’ve read some of it with great interest, but I’d argue that any sort of human interference, even if only to “curate” the spam, dilutes its strength a bit—it’s best encountered in its natural environment, which is to say your inbox, where it can baffle, perturb, interrupt, and otherwise fuck with you.

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)