Gary Indiana RIP

"One Brief, Scuzzy Moment"

 

 

Indiana, reviewing Blake Gopnik's book on Warhol in 2020, writes his own epitaph, and mocks his young fans. 

This book could appear only at a time when the bohemian mobility, sexual freedom, and cultural ferment of New York in the Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties are not simply being forgotten, as people who were there die off, but becoming unimaginable. A time when New York has become so cluelessly middle class that someone can actually write, of the back room at Max’s Kansas City, that Warhol “behaved more like the cool-cat senior in high school who the freshmen do everything to impress and who looks on with amused condescension.” This is the point of view of someone who never, ever could have gotten into Max’s.

Lorentzen now has a tag. I was thinking it was odd Indiana doesn't have one, but Colin doesn't have one either. It's never necessarily been a compliment. I should have one for the new Brooklyn Intellectuals

---

a month later, remembering Menand.

Grozev 

Last December, @juliaioffe  asked me what I thought Prigozhin would do. I said he'd try a coup within six months. (Julia even asked me if I was okay to commit to a timeline on the record). Anyhoo..

I spent most of last night on Twitter and Telegram. A friend tells me Prigozhin's language in this diatribes is untranslatable, rich. A great orator. J's parents lived through the Holodomor, Russian speakers in Kiev.

Seddon

Kremlin spox Dmitry Peskov:

– charges dropped against Prigozhin, who will leave Russia for Belarus

– Wagner fighters who didn't take part in the uprising will sign contracts with the MOD

– Wagner fighters who did take part not charged

– No word on potential MOD leadership changes

Despite declaring Prigozhin a "traitor" and vowing to "liquidate" Wagner on Saturday morning, Peskov said Putin had asked Lukashenko to mediate in the hope of avoiding any further bloodshed because the Belarusian leader has known Prigozhin for 20 years.

Peskov described the uprising – in which Wagner shot down helicopters, captured a major command post, and marched most of the way to Moscow – as "fairly difficult" and "full of tragic events," but said "there were higher goals of escaping bloodshed and internal confrontation."

Putin will not make any further comment on the issue. The invasion of Ukraine will continue as normal.

No word from Peskov on whether Prigozhin managed to secure Shoigu's resignation – he said only Putin has that authority so Prigozhin and Lukashenko couldn't discuss it.

Closer and closer to a failed state. Even Gazprom has it's own militia. And the videos from Moscow last night were teenagers celebrating the end of high school. It's terrifying. 

repeats

There are three distinct groups in Russia: 1/25

1) radicals – a sizeable but extremely loud minority that actively supports war, is engaged, follows the news and in rare cases even goes to the frontlines (15-25%). This is the audience of the milbloggers, Telegram channels and vampires like Solovyov or Skabeeva 2/25

2) dissenters – a sizeable minority that categorically opposes the war. It is banned from Russian-based media and generally depressed (20-25%) 3/25

3) laymen – a passive majority that is completely depoliticized and doesn’t want to have anything in common with politics & war (50-65%) 4/25

"a passive majority that is completely depoliticized and doesn’t want to have anything in common with politics & war" 

Woke from a dream in which Keith McNally was leading a coup against President Biden backed by 25,000 Balthazar waiters.

— CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN (@xlorentzen) June 24, 2023

Balthazar. related in more ways than one.

A thread by Mateev.

Fact: Wagner troops did have their own command structure and were ready to follow Prigozhin.

1/

Fact: in multiple videos from Rostov-on-Don, people were cheering and greeting Prigozhin's troops.

2/

Fact: the army reacted to Prigozhin's coup... by starting negotiations. Prigozhin was caught on camera talking rather arrogantly to Yunus-bek Yevkurov, deputy minister of defense (!!), along with a high-level MoD officer responsible for the interaction with PMCs.

3/

Fact: some skirmishes between Prigozhinists and the army did happen. Several helicopters were downed. One helicopter crew died.

4/

Fact: instead of court-martialing Prigozhin and the rest of the mutineers, Putin - through Lukashenko, of all people! - offered them amnesty and an escape route.

5/ 

What to make of this?

The contours of the possible civil war are suddenly brought into sharp relief.

6/ 

What do the Russian troops consist of at the moment?

1) Akhmat/Kadyrovites, 2) LDNR militias, 3) multiple PMCs other than Wagner (!), 4) local regiments created in each Russian region and financed locally, at least in part (!!)

7/

Furthermore: FSB and other agencies apparently do not have military counterintelligence capable of preventing something like this.

8/

In effect, a free-for-all across the country is totally possible.

Putin said many times that Russia's very existence hangs in the balance - apparently it's true, thanks to his own actions and the system he has built in the last 23 years.

9/

Incredible result for the self-proclaimed "gosudarstennik" [state-minded person] - the state he built is brittle like a porcelain cup.

10/ 

repeats, October 2022. Grozev and Ragozin, Prigozhin and Arestovych.

Looking forward to nuclear blackmail by the competing warlords of the failed Russian state.

updated a bit for added fun.

---

Artforum, 2003. 

Although he becomes only the eighth director in the seven and a half decades of the Whitney’s existence, he is its fourth in just over a dozen years. The board’s 1990 dismissal of Armstrong, who had led the museum since the early ’70s, was widely seen as a sign of newly powerful trustees making a break with the old guard. His replacement, Ross, a risk-taking and famously garrulous advocate of contemporary art, gave the institution a much-needed infusion of energy. But the Whitney’s increased visibility under Ross brought new scrutiny; it soon became the critics’ whipping boy—berated for “political correctness” for shows like the 1993 “Identity Biennial” (as it came to be known) and accused of succumbing to style over substance for its 1994 Richard Avedon exhibition.

I was looking for more old comments on Avedon. 

Michael Kimmelman from 1994. "If Mr. Avedon reminds me of any artist, it is Giovanni Boldini,..."

I lasted two minutes.

Kimmelman has a lousy eye. I don't think he realized how damning the comparison was. John Singer Sargent was a virtuoso, a brilliant technician and a failed composer of pictures. Boldoni was a hack illustrator. Avedon is better than that at least.

Artforum in the 90s was another world. I was there, and I forget. Picked at random and two articles about people from my past. The whole thing was corrupt and cynical, but the cynicism was still out in front, documenting itself. That honesty on "the NY scene" is almost unthinkable now.

May 1994, Rhonda Lieberman "Zen and the Art of Shopping, on Helmut Newton

The first two paragraphs and the last.

Recently, when I had reason to look at a lot of Helmut Newton photos, I underwent a reaction worthy of further investigation. Imaginarily disordered by the elixir of these fabulous images, not unlike Jerry Lewis turning into hipster Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor, I felt so glamorous that I went right into Bendel’s and found something on sale I never would have considered trying on, even venturing into the Fancy section, where I only go when I am feeling especially spirited, and handling really expensive pants. With a bit of reflection, my radical failure of sublimation, the palpable slippage between my enjoyment of the Newton photos and my urge to shop, began to seem less and less strange . . . but would others see it this way?

The conflict between Art and liking nice things has been noted by others greater than I. The intro to a volume of Stendhal’s travel pieces dismisses them as chiefly inspired by the author’s need, despite his 50-something years, to dress at the height of fashion (as if this put their literary merit in question!). Proust suspected Balzac, in his bourgeois novels of ambition, greed, and vanity, of indulging in the reader the very worldly tastes of which Art was supposed to purge you. I realize, through the years, that I have kept a mental file of Great Minds inordinately distracted by clothes and furniture. Kierkegaard was an interesting reverse case, trying to appear as the idle shopper and disowning his brilliantly tortured juvenilia Either/Or as written by someone else: he claimed he happened to find the manuscript in the drawer of a desk he had long coveted and finally bought from a furniture dealer after ogling it, and making daily visits to see it, for weeks, haunted. He describes the stalking process in familiar detail: “My daily route took me past this secondhand dealer and his writing desk, and I never let a day go by without fixing my eyes on it in passing.” In On the Genealogy of Morals, Uncle Friedrich makes short work of the question of one’s personal “interest” in the art object: he mocks Kant as a ridiculous prude for claiming that the Beautiful affects us precisely because it doesn’t affect us personally but appeals to our disinterest; he agrees with Stendhal, who saw in Beauty la promesse de bonheur, the satisfaction of selfish pleasures. Indeed, since galleries and museums are inevitably surrounded by nice stores, the experience of looking at Art has long been confused with shopping for nice things....

Reported on Page Six of the New York Post by Flo Anthony:

The authoress was sighted in the deluxe treatment program for acute mind-body aggravation at the Illinois Home for the Jewish Bewildered, in the exclusive Lee Krasner Memorial Wing, where she busily collects string and continues to dictate her column and to develop her profitable Psychic Whiners Hotline (celebrity spokesmodel Buddy Hackett). She is attended by her adoring photographer, her loyal bodyguard/handbag designer, her perky meditation coach, and fawning hospital staff who mercifully dress in last season’s Chanel and are required by contract to speed recovery by remaining at least ten pounds heavier than the client, like Vivian Vance on I Love Lucy. Her editor/manicurist commutes weekly from NYC to inspire her with rousing lectures on Femininity and Aggression, and makes sure her apartment is free of dust.

Every morning, radiant after thighmastering, she works on her big hook (the one they’re all waiting for!), Identity: Pro or Con?, set in a dry-cleaning store in New Haven, Conn. One of the highlights: just one week after a lobotomy, the heroine wows her audience by delivering a stunning paper on cross-dressing as it subverts culturally constructed gender roles. Snatched up in a record 20 minutes by Yale University Press, the book has already created a startling buzz in the publishing world, the immoderate advance explained only by its uniformly giddy assemblage of unexpected allies including Suzanne Somers (“A fresh approach to the subjectivities of mass culture. It’s great!”), Gloria Steinem (“It did wonders for my self-esteem!”), Slavoj Zižek (“I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats!”), Harold Bloom (“I keep it in my bathroom!”), and William Buckley (“I love the part about the Jews and the sailboat!”), whose tear-stained reader report gushed, “I keep it with me at all times. One of the most moving and inspiring first-draft manuscripts that I have ever read . . . the drama proceeds savagely, erotically . . . I now read Rhonda daily, there is wisdom on every page.”

In 2014 she's writing for The Baffler, and 2019 The New Republic

repeat

In the late 90s, a 40 year old woman, a well known artist,  told me me everything she'd learned about being a woman she'd learned from drag queens. The switch is important: from the artifice of femininity built out of biology and culture, out of necessity, to an art built out of fantasy—from representation to mannerism—and then returned to the source. 

again

“What’s on the menu?” asks Kissinger, and I can barely restrain myself from shrieking, “What’s on the menu, Henry? Would that be Operation Menu?” 

It all brings back memories of sitting in the basement at the Gramercy Park Hotel listening to Joey Arias channel Billie Holiday.

Lorentzen on Martin Amis in the Financial Times

What magnificent prose and what a peculiar personality underneath it. Amis wrote a long feature on the pornography industry for Tina Brown’s Talk Magazine in 2001 and only at the end confessed to his horror of seeing pricks on screen. He made a speciality of low-life subject matter but he was always a bookworm, always a literary critic, at heart.

"Prick" and "dick", because "cock" forms the mouth into an orifice. The displaced/transposed O: "horror of seeing pricks" for "fear of seeing cocks".

His heroes across the Atlantic were Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, but the American writer that Martin Amis — who has died aged 73 — most resembled was Norman Mailer.

Because Lorentzen is unable to say "Hitchens".  Mailer himself said he was less a reader of literature than a practitioner of it.

Lorentzen, and n+1, etc: the literary culture of gentrified Brooklyn in post-9/11 New York; inward-looking, earnest, provincial.

Aaron Ross Powell and Brian Albrecht

Powell: I’m disappointed to see Substack giving prime promotional real estate to Robert Reich. Reich is probably best characterized as the progressive Ben Shapiro. He sounds smart and persuasive to partisans, and they like to think he’s “destroyed” the views of people they don’t like, but his arguments are thin, almost always misleading, and people with a deep understanding of the issues he’s talking about, even those sympathetic to his positions, generally view him as an unserious thinker. Progressives can do a lot better.

Albrecht: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I wonder to what extent it is reasonable to expect Substack to know the difference. They see who generates readers and subscribers. Can I really expect them to independently identify experts across fields?

P: Not in every case, no. But there are obviously cases where one really ought to know if someone purporting to be an expert in fact isn’t. “How could we have known RFK Jr. isn’t actually a well-regarded expert on vaccines?” But I don’t know how or where to draw that line. I was mainly expressing broader frustration at how many people don’t know that Reich is a charlatan.

A: That’s my frustration too.

Substack Speaks, defending Robert Reich 

This publication is a place for thoughtful discussion around writers’ work. Substack is also founded on the belief that writers and their work deserve respect.

We ask that writers keep conversations civil in the comments of this publication and other Substack spaces where we gather writers, such as events. That means respecting one other’s perspectives and life experiences in your conversations, and refraining from cruel or derogatory language. It is not a place for irrelevant rants or off-topic digressions.

As such we are disabling comments on this post. You can read more about our approach to the comments and community interactions in this publication here: https://on.substack.com/p/community-guidelines

These Community Guidelines only apply to spaces that we manage, like our company publications, events, and programs, and are completely separate and distinct from the Substack Content Guidelines, which outline what is and is not acceptable on the Substack platform as a whole as part of our hands-off approach to moderation that puts writers and readers in charge - https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderation.

Leighten Woodhouse is concerned: "Can someone at Substack explain why so many comments here were removed? I’m open to there being a good reason but on its face it looks a bit alarming." 

Specialist writing for a general audience at best is writing for an audience as you would like to imagine it, while trying not to be esoteric, obscure, needlessly technical or consciously high-brow.  Writing for profit can become writing for fans. It's amazing how much conversation on Substack revolves around either claims of censorship or bragging rights.

Artists are better than academics at negotiating the politics of popularity. Not that they don't mostly fail, but pedants fall hard. DeLong and Noah Smith are unbearable. Reich and Krugman are political figures and it's useless to pretend otherwise. But it's equally useless to pretend Substack isn't a publisher and that all the competition for hits is about impressing the techbro editors above. And it's interesting or not how much racial-rationalism tecbros approve. The moral indignation of Lorentzen and Taibbi are more related than one of them at least might want to admit. 

Ganz writes a piece on right-wing nostalgia for left-wing authoritarianism. 

"First off, Compact itself exists to peddle this sort of hybridization of Left and Right themes, which I have elsewhere called an “unholy alliance.” (As a quick aside, in a recent piece, Slavoj Zizek, who sadly is a contributor to Compact, used this very term in a recent essay, writing, “We live in an era of unholy alliances, a combination of ideological elements which violate the standard opposition of Left and Right.”)

As I point out in that piece, the attempt to find such a Left-Right synthesis is an old and dishonorable tradition."

You'd hope he'd have learned something by now—and this still makes me laugh. I reminded him that Sohrab Ahmari is a fan of Mike Davis.

...I devoured City of Quartz, and then I read everything else Davis had written up to that point, and I was left wanting more.

Ganz replied that he was too, which, after all was my point. I quoted T.J. Clark (see the link) and said as I always do that apocalyptic romance is where radicalism meets fascism, adding that if he read Davis as more than a passive writer of elegiac prose he would have at least when he was living in Bushwick spent some time at the end of a night in the back of a bodega with a last beer and a couple of tacos sitting with workers home from a late shift, or smoking a cigarette with a bakery worker on a break. But he's admitted that he has no social ties outside his scene. 

Ganz writes for dollars communing to his followers. Journalists write on Substack as a way to get things out and make some extra cash. They bring their own readers. I'm not quibbling. Milanovic just posts like an academic blogger, without a paywall. But this is what Substack was made for. Found via a "thank you!" from a writer recommended by Lorentzen.

A European monarch once awarded me a medal for extraordinary service, an oil baron unknowingly gave me millions of dollars to do some focus groups, and a Pulitzer Prize winner convinced me to buy a trailer park.

Oddly, the thread that ties these random random facts of my life together is a weird junior high school I went to that mashed 6th, 7th, and 8th graders together, didn’t have formal subjects, and emphasized writing as a tool to understand the world.

I didn’t realize how much I missed that experience until I started sifting the sands of Substack, unearthing writing that dissolved the boundaries that I thought existed between me and the world. 

My goal with my Substack is to help you feel more peaceful, more understood, and more human, by recommending my favorite Substack articles. I also hope that, perhaps once a year, something that I write will bring you bliss.

Pablum and happy talk, from and ex-congressional staffer now at the Pew Charitable Trusts. 

Milanovic

Van Bavel’s key idea is as follows.  In societies where non-market constraints are dominant (say, in feudal societies), liberating factor markets is a truly revolutionary change. Ability of peasants to own some land or to lease it, of workers to work for wages rather than to be subjected to various types of corvées, or of the merchants to borrow at a more or less competitive market  rather than to depend on usurious rates, is liberating at an individual level (gives person much greater freedom), secures property, and unleashes the forces of economic growth. The pace of activity quickens, growth accelerates (true, historically, from close to zero to some small number like 0.5% per year) and even inequality, economic and above all social, decreases. This is the period so well recognized and analyzed by Adam Smith. Van Bavel, in a nod to Braudel, shows that very similar “essors”  have existed in the pre-medieval Iraq (then the most developed part of the world), medieval Central and Northern Italy (Florence, Venice, Milan, Genoa..) and on the cusp between the late medieval Europe and early modern period in the Low Countries.

But the process, Bavel argues, contains the seeds of its destruction. Gradually factor markets cover more and more of the population: Bavel is excellent in providing numerical estimates on, for example, the percentage of wage-earners in Lombardy in the 14th century or showing that in Low Countries wage labor was, because of guilds, less prevalent in urban than in rural areas.  One factor market, though, that of capital and finance, gradually begins to dominate. Private and public debt become most attractive investments, big fortunes are made in finance, and those who originally asked for the level playing field and removal of feudal-like constraints, now use their wealth to conquer the political power and impose a serrata, thus making the rules destined to keep them forever on the top. What started as an exercise in political and economic freedom begins to look like an exercise in cementing the acquired power, politically and economically. The economic essor is gone, the economy begins to stagnate and, as happened to Iraq, Northern Italy and Low Countries, is overtaken by the competitors.*

As this short sketch shows, Bavel’s theory has many links, or can be juxtaposed, to several contemporary views of economic history. Bavel is dismissive of a unilinear view that regards the ever widening role of factor markets, including the financial, as leading to ever higher incomes and greater political freedom. His view, although not fully cyclical (on which I will say a bit  more at the very end of the review) is “endogenously curvilinear”: things which were good originally, when they hypertrophy, become a hindrance to further growth. It is thus a story of the rise and fall where, like in Greek tragedies, the very same factors that brought the protagonists grandeur, eventually hurl them into the abyss.

...It is not only the plausibility of the mechanism of decline that gives strength to Bavel’s thesis; it is also that he lists the manifestation of the decline, observable in all six cases. Financial investments yield much more than investments in the real sector, the economy begins to resemble a casino, the political power of the financiers becomes enormous. The richest among the financiers either directly or indirectly enter politics, they become patrons of arts,  sponsors of sports and education,  and we witness simultaneously (1) oligarchic politics, (2) slower growth and lower level of real investments, (3) higher inequality, (4) domination of finance and (5) artistic efflorescence.  What the ancient writers describe as “decadence” clearly sets it, but, as Bavel is at pains to note, it is not caused by moral defects of the ruling class but by the type of economy that is being created.  Extravagant bidding for assets whose quantity is fixed (land and art) is a further manifestation of such an economy: the bidding for fixed assets reflects lack of alternative profitable investments as well as the expectation that, as inequality increases, there would be some even crazier and richer investors who would pay even more for a work of art, thus enabling the realization of a capital gain. 

I'm torn between nodding and saying no fucking shit, but it's a good description of the economic origins of apocalyptic romance.  Materialism is the least romantic worldview imaginable, but that's why a passive romanticism attaches itself. And though it should be obvious, that includes Gerhard Richter. 

I'm not immune, but I'm not immune to anything I've ever written about. Nothing human is alien to me. That's the point right? The last thing I said to Ganz is that I'm torn between art and politics. Art usually wins, but that makes me a bit cranky.

---

I really hate Lorentzen. His world is petty and pathetic. This is just sad. But he's managed to remind me that I shouldn't have turned down the job with David Salle in 1986—I didn't want to move the the Hamptons and I'd decided to go back to school. Lorentzen is nostalgic for a decadence that I'm closer to than he can ever be. But I kept my distance at the time, and what's replaced it is worse. I have so many regrets. I missed my chance. I missed a lot of fun. Then again I'd never had had the patience. And Salle's work was never what he thought or pretended it was.

Inbox 5/1 HRW: Joint Statement: UAE Human Rights Record Ahead of COP28

Authorities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) continue their sustained assault on human rights and freedoms, including targeting human rights activists, enacting repressive laws, and using the criminal justice system as a tool to eliminate the human rights movement. These policies have led to the closure of civic space, severe restrictions on freedom of expression, both online and offline, and the criminalization of peaceful dissent.

For more than 10 years, UAE authorities have been unjustly detaining at least 60 Emirati human rights defenders, civil society activists, and political dissidents who were arrested in 2012 because of their demands for reform and democracy or their affiliation with the Reform and Social Guidance Association (al-Islah). Some from this group, which are commonly known as the "UAE 94" because of the number of defendants in their mass trial, were subjected to enforced disappearance, torture, and other ill-treatment. They were sentenced to between 7 and 15 years in prison during a trial in 2013 that failed to meet minimum fair trial standards.

More than three-quarters of these prisoners have completed their sentences yet remain in arbitrary detention to date. UAE authorities refuse to release them, alleging that they continue to pose a "terrorist threat," based on vague laws that allow their indefinite detention, in flagrant violation of international human rights law

Taken Hostage in the UAE. Modern slavery

Inbox 5/10, from Artforum. Must See: The Sharjah Biennial 

AT THE DAWN OF THE CENTURY, no special sign presaged Sharjah’s rise to its present status as an artistic incubator and arguably today’s most influential hub of research and creation focused on what is now called the Global South. Yes, its ruler, Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, launched the Sharjah Biennial in 1993. But in its early editions, the exhibition was relatively staid, presenting neo-modernist art from Arab and Muslim countries on the national-pavilion model. Compared with glitzy Dubai, the city of Sharjah, capital of the eponymous emirate, was (and remains) low-rise and conservative despite the influx of wealth from oil and gas.

In 2002, Hoor Al Qasimi, the sheikh’s youngest daughter, who studied at London’s Slade School of Fine Art and Royal College of Art, visited Documenta 11 in Kassel, which Okwui Enwezor curated. That exhibition was decentralized, with earlier programs in Vienna, New Delhi, Saint Lucia, and Lagos all feeding into the main show. It embraced collectives and research-based practices. It afforded each artist space to articulate their vision rather than imposing a tightly sequenced curatorial narrative. And although it included white European and North American artists, its roster leaned hard toward what Enwezor called the “postcolonial constellation,” with its diasporic tendrils....

Every artist expresses a subject position within Enwezor’s “postcolonial constellation,” and if you miss white Euro-American perspectives, you are welcome to seek them elsewhere. 

Woke authoritarian mercantilist capitalism. Israel and the US approve: The Abraham Accords

Inbox today from Artforum,

Sculptor Tom Sachs today wrote to the New York Times to offer a public apology regarding his alleged treatment of staff. The apology arrived in the wake of Nike’s confirmation that it was “not working with Tom’s studio at this time and [has] no release dates planned.” Sachs, whose work investigates the various intersections of fashion, consumerism, science, and the military, had since 2012 collaborated with the footwear giant to create sneakers. The shoes were so sought after that they often achieved several times their original price on the resale market.

The New York–based contemporary artist, whose works have commanded gallery prices of $300,000, saw his empire rocked after the February publication of a help-wanted ad on the website of the nonprofit New York Foundation for the Arts sparked contempt, criticism, and, perhaps worst of all, conversation. The ad, posted anonymously by an “Art World Family” seeking an executive personal assistant, was reposted by Emily Colucci on her blog, where it drew attention for its excruciating and lengthy description of the many tasks required of the person who would “make life easier for the couple in every way possible.”

 “‘We want you to be a personal assistant, we want you to be an executive assistant, but we also want you to do all kinds of liaising with our staff,’ which sounds to me like three jobs,” painter Emily Mae Smith told the Times a few days after the ad went up. “Oh, and babysitting?”

“That’s a job where, if you’re hired, it’s a countdown to being fired,” poet and performer Soren Stockman, an executive assistant, told the paper. “This person wants to never be affected by anything irritating. There’s no way to fill that need for someone.”

"Research" and "investigation". Sachs was the first artist I knew to get a PR person. But again this is the time when art was becoming fashion, and "conceptualism" was becoming design. The Sharjah Biennial is less art than style sold on money and lies. Without either there'd be only a smaller regional audience, and who knows what you'd find under the surface.  Film festivals in Iran are more serious, because more local, and because films, like books, aren't luxury commodities, so conspicuous consumption is effect not cause.

The politics of design is either conservative—fashion and furniture—or reactionary. "The research model" is reactionary. 

Picasso in 1923

I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. 

And 1927

...Moreover. this feeling for exactitude is one I have always held onto in my researches. 

The beginning of his slide into kitsch.

"The Design Economy"  

"...poet and performer Soren Stockman, an executive assistant,"

Soren Stockman's LinkedIn page

Award-winning poet with over a decade of high level administrative experience supporting the top professionals in their field in New York City and beyond. Organized events attended by thousands on three continents featuring today's most celebrated and accomplished artists and executives. Excels at front facing work as well as managing an office's internal operations. Intuitive and anticipatory to the needs of others, as well as to the needs of a given task or project. I am precise and sensitive in both verbal and written communication. I'm a people person.  

Executive Assistant Ares Management Corporation

Krugman in 2010, late to the game: "Pretty soon, we’ll be having serious, completely un-self-conscious discussions in major magazines about the servant problem."

Crooked Timber in 2007: 24 hour nanny service for college professors, linked in 2012.

More from 2012: a list, including the above, and another.

Most of the people I've known who've made the choice to be servants extend the logic of servant and master to their political morality. People who like to serve want to be cared for. The worst snobs are not the masters but the direct servants of the powerful. George Will and David Brooks have the arrogance not of rulers but of their attendants. Their anger is directed mostly at this who refuse to serve.

2010 

Historically, cosmopolitanism is an assumption of universalism only as overlaying the particular. It's the acceptance of contradiction, not the assumption that it can, will, or even should be overcome. Technocracy cannot value the particular. It couldn't function if it did, and overdetermined particularism as narcissism is blowback. 

Related from 2016, Zadie Smith, novelist for bankers, and Remains of the Day.

From 2005, Didion, her servants, and the scene Lorentzen likes to memorialize.

The post just below, the servant Stangl.

Sachs was the worst of an extended crew that included Peter Dinklage, who no doubt now has servants. It's a job. The choice as career is something else.

"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?"

Lorentzen on Cormac McCarthy

According to Alicia, the love between the siblings is a matter of mutual recognition in a world where neither of them otherwise belongs. ‘I knew that I wasnt supposed to be in Wartburg Tennessee and I thought it possible that Bobby had found where it was that I was supposed to be. Where we were supposed to be.’ She names the mountains of Romania. ‘For how long did you entertain this fantasy?’ Cohen asks. She replies: ‘I entertain it yet.’

Her comment suggests that the motive of her suicide might be to join her brother, whom she has taken for dead, and that the act is something beyond her free will. Bobby’s realisation that he is in love with his sister, when he was a grad student and she was thirteen, is similarly presented as something beyond his conscious reckoning: ‘Watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.’ What he is watching is Alicia performing the role of Medea, alone and in costume, on the floor of a quarry, lit by smoky homemade kerosene lamps. It’s a powerful image and one that comes completely out of the blue. There is another temptation for the reader: to connect these children and their behaviour to their father, the bomb maker, to see the bomb as something that emerged from the collective human unconscious, something animals made while tending to their own survival. Alicia tells Cohen that ‘anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention. It’s up there with fire and language ... and it may be number one.’ As for its makers: ‘I think most of the scientists didnt give that much thought to what was going to happen. They were just having a good time. They all said the same thing about the Manhattan Project. That they’d never had so much fun in their lives.’ Some have their fun actually burning down the world, others write novels.

2007 One I haven't repeated, 

Dennett and Determinism, Bill and Buddha Nature: Killers as Heroes (and actors as gods) in the Films of Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino's movies are as politically reactionary as Mel Gibson's, but only one of them gets called for it. Honesty in Kill Bill is the following of one's true self. Clark Kent is the sham persona. Bill reminds Beatrix that she's a killer, and that her daughter is one as well. This is neither moral nor immoral but simple determinism, whether genetic or metaphysical is irrelevant. And Beatrix is both the hero and the victor. The best killer wins.

tags: Mannerism and The Gothic. The Dark Knight and Epic Cinema, Determinism, Kubrick, etc.

We'll meet again, Don't know where, Don't know when, But I know we'll meet again some sunny day

I could add something about Game of Thrones, but that would be obvious.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Aubade, Philip Larkin

nobody expects the spanish inquisition.

It's hard to know what to say, other than what I've said before. Varieties of decadence, and they're all so earnest. But still...

The Decadents knew that Catholicism pairs well with transgression. The Metropolitan Museum of Art knows it, too: It held an exhibition titled “Heavenly Bodies” in 2018, a show that juxtaposed liturgical iconography with high fashion and BDSM paraphernalia. Catholicism embraces the give-and-take between sin and repentance, formalizing it in the sacrament of confession. 

An open defense of Catholic decadence from a young "senior editor" at First Things.  Homosexuality, and other fun, are welcome, as long as you confess your sodomy on Sunday morning.  John Waters read this and he's laughing; and a lot of others too, all older than Julia Yost and Matthew Schmitz.  Richard John Neuhaus would be horrified. But what about his goddaughter? And Yost name checks Nick Burns (same link).  

Another recent trip down memory lane, because the liberals mocking her are equally so utterly clueless. Left right and center, it's all cosplay. 

Just for fun: Three posts on Alexander McQueen and Giovanni Bellini 

Also, Bronzino, who now has a tag.

In the larger sense I've been describing this for decades—the origins of the reactionary politics of truth. What I didn't predict was a literal return to the Church. I've quoted the popular definition of kitsch as something or someone being "more Catholic than the Pope", and now here we are! 

Also tagged Vermeule. 

 

Lorentzen has a series of podcast interviews he labels "Truth & Beauty".

The focus on aesthetics in a time of crisis, the false equivalence with "truth", the mix of puffery and denial, irony hiding sincerity, as if we don't have access to the history.  

Milanovic rt'd a friend on why he didn't listen to stupid podcasts: the directness of listening to the voice as opposed to reading, the insecurity and fakery becomes obvious and almost unbearable.

Art is the product of culture. Really. 

The thought that Mozart would have preferred to write for a small audience goes against everything we know about the music itself. Mozart wasn't a snob, but both Adorno and Schönberg were. And they became the model for the art and politics of university chairs. Jäger is blind to his own decadence. Jäger, Slobodian. and the rest. 

It's all in the manuscript.

The decadence of Weber

After Nietzsche's devastating criticism of those 'last men' who 'invented happiness,' I may leave aside altogether the naive optimism in which science–that is, the technique of mastering life which rests upon science–has been celebrated as the way to happiness. Who believes in this? –aside from a few big children in university chairs or editorial offices.

So much for disenchantment. Who needs gods when you have ghosts?

Adorno

After all, I have to look out for the interests of the Institute—our old Institute, Herbert—and these interests would be directly endangered by such a circus, believe me: the prevailing tendency to block any subsidies coming to us would grow acutely. 

Panofsky

The late Scholastic logicians devised amusing helps to memory by which the many forms or figures of syllogism (conclusions from a major and minor premise) could be remembered. These mnemonic devices consisted of words of three syllables partly real and partly made up for the purpose. Each syllable stood for one of the three propositions, and the vowels therein signified the character of these propositions. The vowel a, for instance, denoted a general and positive statement; the vowel o, a partial and negative one. Thus the nice name Barbara, with its three as, designates a syllogism that consists of three general and positive propositions (for instance: 'All men are mortal all mortal beings need food consequently all men need food"). And for a syllogism consisting of one general and positive proposition and two partial and negative ones (for instance: "All cats have whiskers some animals have no whiskers consequently some animals are not cats"), there was coined the word Baroco, containing one a and two os. Either the word, or the peculiarly roundabout fashion of the main of thought denoted by it, or both, must have struck later generations as particularly funny and characteristic of the pedantic formalism to which they objected in medieval thought , and when humanistic writers, including Montaigne, wished to ridicule an unworldly and sterile pedant, they reproached him with having his head full of "Barbara and Baroco," etc. Thus it came about that the word Baroco (French and English Baroque) came to signify everything wildly abstruse, obscure, fanciful, and useless (much as the word intellectual in many circles today). (The other derivation of the term from Latin veruca and Spanish barueca, meaning, originally, a wart and by extension a pearl of irregular shape, is most improbable both for logical and purely linguistic reasons.)

Milton Babbitt 

This article might have been entitled "The Composer as Specialist" or, alternatively, and perhaps less contentiously, "The Composer as Anachronism." For I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as "serious," "advanced," contemporary music. his composer expends an enormous amount of time and energy- and, usually, considerable money- on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value. e is, in essence, a "vanity" composer. he general public is largely unaware of and uninterested in his music. he majority of performers shun it and resent it. Consequently, the music is little performed, and then primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow 'professionals'. At best, the music would appear to be for, of, and by specialists.

Joseph Kerman on Babbitt 

His writing of the 1950s had developed into a strange amalgam. Conjoined with a fanatical scientism, a search for quasi-logical precision of reference which tortured his syntax into increasingly Jamesian spirals for very un-Jamesian ends, there was an undertone of distress, even rage, erupting into repeated assaults and innuendos directed against various predictable targets. This scarcely contained emotion issued obviously (and openly enough) from the same sense of modernist alienation as was expressed very differently by Schoenberg or, to take an even more extravagant case, Adorno. But while Adorno was telling anyone who would listen at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen that modern music was decisively cut off from decadent bourgeois culture, Babbitt at Princeton was pointing out that avant-garde music could find its niche after all – though only by retreating from one bastion of middle class culture, the concert hall, to another, the university. Like pure science, he argued, musical composition has a claim on the university as a protector of abstract thought. (The complicity of composition and theory, it will be seen, was crucial to this argument, the complicity of theory and mathematics extremely helpful.) Instead of lamenting the no-doubt irreparable breach between avant-garde music and the public, composers like mathematicians should turn their backs on the public and demand their rightful place in the academy. Otherwise ‘music will cease to evolve, and in that important sense, will cease to live'. 

SE, continuing

“Jamesian spirals for very un-Jamesian ends.” Kerman restates my arguments, marking the same line from the subjective but impersonal to the ‘objective’, formality to formalism, elision to denial, from bourgeois culture to technocratic anti-culture. But he ignores that Babbitt’s and Adorno’s prescriptions are variations of the same institutionalism, with the same positivist, Weberian, contempt for art. If Babbitt’s art succeeds it succeeds in spite of this. The undertones in his essays,  "of distress, even rage, erupting into repeated assaults” is matched in his music. The parallel is not science or mathematics but the other art music of its time: free Jazz. Formal logic is a cover. 

Expressionism in the atomic age is the product of technocracy and the bomb, the emotion escaping the denial of emotion; it's the melodrama behind positivism, from Vienna to Weimar to New York, the relation of Strangelove to von Neumann. This is what Brendel and Rosen, and Kerman, as exegetes, interpreters not pedants, who are neither positivists nor emotionalists, rationalists nor irrationalists, are describing and debating. If music is formal, how can a gesture that breaks with the form, function within it? Rosen says Brendel defends farting in Church; he misses the logic behind the change. If Beethoven puts an explosion at the end of the metrical line, then formal art has become mimetic. One of my teachers, Abe Ajay, an arch modernist, a friend of Ad Reinhardt who worked with him at The New Masses, used to complain that Beethoven ruined his music with images. "All those wonderful notes and then... Birds!!" Abe wasn’t joking, but I laughed. This is what Schoenberg and Babbitt rebelled against, not Beethoven but the only option for those following him into the 20th century: the vulgar romance of Korngold and the program music of Hollywood, music of the classical western tradition no longer independent, now subservient to another form, the art of images.  

Jäger's vanguardism is reactionary scholasticism.

Meanwhile John Ganz, who deleted his twitter account briefly after being mocked for asking why NATO could be considered colonialist, on the NY hipster wars (repeats: Nick Burns, Lorentzen, et al.)  

Cooper calls it "splendid" 

They pride themselves in being retrograde or blithely unaware along a number of axes, from declaring, as a last ditch Bohemian provocation, their fealty to conventional bourgeois values; their preoccupation with adolescence; appropriation of lower-brow or conservative religious themes; their affectation of not being the product of arts education but rather the native denizens of the dark underbelly of internet message boards; their deliberate cultivation of a sense of mental debility or confusion with results that less like Dadaist or Futurist experimentation and more just senseless chatter and maudlin ecstasy.

Also Ganz

i dont understand what the interest in kink would be if it's not at all taboo, kink shamers are doing you a favor tbh

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) July 14, 2022

They're all so confused. And they all defend technocracy: the rule of experts talking amongst themselves. 

Jäger can write about Houellebecq; all Cooper can talk about is video games and argue that It's a Wonderful Life is "the greatest American film of all time." But none of them are able to describe their own politics with any honesty. 

---

jumping ahead: Ganz explains fascism. 

The New Statesman, "New York’s hipster wars"

Why the city’s clash of cultures between progressive Brooklyn and transgressive Manhattan marks a new era in American politics.

In American cultural and intellectual life, New York City sets the tone. As the main hub for the country’s media and frequent originator of trends that percolate through US society, what’s “in” with the New York scene today is often central to American culture tomorrow. And politics, too ­– as US conservatives never tire of noting – is often downstream of culture.

But New York City’s intellectual landscape is increasingly split between two warring scenes, divided by geography, aesthetics and politics. Which of these prevails could affect whether America shifts right or remains where it is.

In Brooklyn, the borough associated with the “hipster” revolution from the late 2000s, writers energised by the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 retain their faith in left-wing politics through new “small” magazines. But on the island of Manhattan, a self-consciously transgressive artistic and literary scene is brewing downtown. In podcasts, plays and literary journals, a different sensibility is being elaborated. Scornful of the “woke” sanctimony of Brooklyn-based media, some flirt with alternative ideologies, while others claim not to be interested in politics at all.

[see also: A farewell to Enid’s, Greenpoint’s iconic “hipster” hangout]

Who wins in New York’s clash of cultures is high-stakes for the future of American political culture.... 

The first time I walked in Enid's all I thought was that it felt like the midwest: slackers from suburban Illinois and their junkie ex-cheerleader girlfriends. 

"And politics, too ­– as US conservatives never tire of noting – is often downstream of culture."

Serendipity/timing...

That culture might be powerless to affect the movement of history was a perception Viennese society held in abeyance for half a century, by endorsing every avant-garde that appeared in its arts and literature. 

The author is an American, a nationalist hipster conservative.

Even the pointless endless squabbling of the American culture war—which I have called an engine of unfreedom—is also a machine that originates new doctrines quickly copied from Brazil to Bessarabia, that generates entirely new lifestyles, physical-medical-cultural modes of life hitherto unknown.

To be present at the creation is why one lives in America and in New York specifically, why one bears the thousand tiny indignities of life here, why one consents to being broiled in summer and frozen in winter, ripped off for everything in all seasons, why one submits to the terrible restlessness and the deleterious effect on the body of the climate, the cuisine, the lifestyle—why it’s necessary to endure the vulgarity that pervades the city at every level, up to the highest levels of supposed refinement and intellectualism....

A postscript: I recently published a piece for the New Statesman gathering some observations on the political-cultural landscape in New York City. Just a fun little piece for the Brits, something to give them a very rough sense of developments here, because they love that sort of thing.  I figured it would probably get lukewarm pick-up this side of the Atlantic because I didn’t come out swinging against any of the people I mentioned.

Wrong! People outside New York City were irritated by what they perceived as an exaggeration on my part of the influence of a handful of figures in New York City, none of whom are household names. And after another essay was published earlier in the week, people in New York City were fed up with articles about cultural developments in lower Manhattan 

He links to Lorentzen's response. They're part of the same stupid scene. 

"In American cultural and intellectual life, New York City sets the tone....Who wins in New York’s clash of cultures is high-stakes for the future of American political culture." 

"To be present at the creation is why one lives in America and in New York specifically." 

I fucking had to laugh. A Californian fantasy of the center of the universe, 30[?] years too late. 

"—which I have called..." From the link:

Michel Foucault, ever more out of favour on the left, would have been right to see the American culture war itself as an engine of unfreedom, a means of disciplining thought and action on both sides.

Foucault, after Tocqueville, and all the conservatives, and historians who read them, who've made the distinction between aristocracy and wealth, and Puritans and drunks. Lawrence, as always: "The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish. Destroy! destroy! destroy!..." 

American liberals are optimists about themselves; American conservatives are pessimists about everyone else. The first principle for both is their own self-image. 

Leiter links to the wife of a recently fired Princeton professor, Joshua Katz.

I decided to apply for early admission to Princeton after sitting in on Professor Joshua Katz’s seminar in April of 2012.

...In November 2018, Joshua bought my father a martini and asked for permission to marry me. In March 2019, we found our dream home in Princeton. That December, Joshua proposed. 

I'm not a moralist. Is all that is just pious?

Solveig Gold, First Things, "Princeton and the Erosion of Expertise"

Plato argued that we should, in all areas of life, defer to experts. If you wish to raise good horses, employ an expert horse-trainer. If you wish to cure a sick man, take him to an expert doctor. And if you wish to live in a harmonious city, enthrone an expert statesman.

One would be hard-pressed to find a group of people today who take greater pride or place more stock in expertise than the faculty members at my alma mater, Princeton University. “Trust the experts”: a constant refrain, plastered across their yard signs and social media accounts. In theory, it’s easy to imagine the little town of Princeton, New Jersey, as a modified, modern-day Kallipolis.

A second generation writer for First Things; a defender of free speech and the Federalist Society; published in The New Criterion, defending western civilization against attacks by Peter Beinart. 

Peter Beinart’s assertion last week, in “The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech,” that “the West is a racial and religious term” has raised more than a few eyebrows, primarily for its implication that to champion Western Civilization is to participate in bigotry. Jonah Goldberg’s article in National Review took Beinart to task on this point, offering a rousing defense of Western Civilization. But not yet fully debunked is Beinart’s initial premise: that is, that “the West” is code for white, Christian culture—a culture that belongs to white Christians, and to them alone.

"Western Civilization" celebrates white marble statues; the Greeks themselves were all in for polychrome vulgarity. And "Plato, we know, looked back with nostalgia at the immobile schemata of Egyptian art."  

The Federalist Society is no more conservative than the Club for Growth. The fight is over the definition of freedom, the American religion. American conservatives are fakers and vulgarians, like Ralph Lauren as a WASP. On the hipster's page I compared him to Whit Stillman and Andrew Exum. Stillman is a fantasist, and Exum sees himself as a cold war liberal in his own Vietnam. The Alden Pyle schtick was old in 1955. But American liberals now call themselves leftists—they're now social democrats—and American conservatives agree. Facts are boring to the faithful.  And we also have a new crew of fascists; academic fascist kitsch, and suburban club kid college graduates. I've mentioned Anna Khachiyan once and that's enough. I've never written about Whit Stillman, but I've told a story about Tina Barney, from before Stillman made his first film. Barney and Gold, a couple of Jewish Shiksa goddesses in an anti-Semitic world. It's amusing rereading it that I obviously worked on the tone, as I have here, maybe too much. I indulge myself responding to this shit, calling their snobbery and raising it. It's an affectation.

I never posted this pic and you can't find it anymore, but it takes me back.

Ibn Flashman.

unrealized projects. In these last few hours

Still having fun with this one

---

Thinking about Fantin-Latour again, because of Lorentzen and Indiana, again. Lorentzen's foreword to Indiana's new collection at Jacobin.  Jacobin is to the Jacobins what Brooklyn Industries is to... (and that's an old one too).

Lorentzen's blurb is awful.

Indiana is often associated in the popular mind or the minds of magazine editors with the “Downtown” Manhattan of the 1980s, and while this is not wrong—he was living as he does still, some of the time, in the East Village, was present at the Mudd Club, and so on—it is not enough. The vision of his novels, especially his true crime trilogy (Resentment, Three Month Fever, Depraved Indifference) spans the whole of America, and his literary sensibility is rooted in Europe.

For most of the 20th century New York was the place Americans went to escape their country without using a passport. It was last stop before leaving. You'd think a former editor of the LRB should know that, but it was clear a long time ago he didn't. As a gallery director from Vienna told me almost 20 years ago,  NY is provincial now.  

Indiana belongs with Leo Bersani and Dale Peck, and Daniel Harris, and Jayne County: "white faggots" of a certain age and place, sitting around talking, and now facing death threats from their erstwhile epigones. Remember "The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory": trash-talking reactionaries, honest, now beatified, cleansed, in academia.

Lorentzen 

Most of the writers, artists, and filmmakers Indiana scrutinizes in these pages are geniuses, and his criticism meets them at their level. From the fictions of Paul Scheerbart to the paintings of the young artist Sam McKinniss,...

I had to use google, and laugh.

McKinniss’s work arouses thoughts about the Leibnizian fuzziness between fiction and documentary reality, about concealment and revelation, about forms of masquerade, the mutability of memory. His paintings evoke a waking dream where figures of fiction, on furlough from their narratives, have real metaphorical force. Celebrities are fictional, whatever else they are; McKinniss’s pictures of them are layered in artifice, approximations of “perfect moments” in the careers of certain images.

McKinniss

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904), whose flower paintings McKinniss frequently copies, has been called “a traditional painter with avant-garde sympathies,” which could apply to contemporary artists like Dike Blair, Maureen Gallace, Billy Sullivan, and McKinniss, who are realist painters of no discernible school, very different in style, innovators in subject matter and formal design. Alex Katz might fit in here, too. However traditional their techniques, their works are recognizably of our time, informed by the convulsive history of modernism and the wider movement of current events. Even McKinniss’s atmospheric copies of Fantin-Latour have a Pierre Menard kind of postmodernity; we see them through the filter of the past hundred years. (I like the knife on the table that features in Still Life with Primroses, Pears and Pomegranates (after Fantin-Latour), 2018—how criminal!)

What Fantin-Latour represents for McKinniss is something close to perfection in paint, the apogee of particular skills and sensitivities that McKinniss also has in abundance. I could be mistaken, but I think McKinniss’s embrace of Fantin-Latour is also his way of telling us he isn’t running for flavor of the month. Both artists are intoxicated by music.

McKinness in the New Yorker, by Jia Tolentino, another young sophisticate who isn't.

Last year, the twenty-year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde contacted the Brooklyn-based painter Sam McKinniss through mutual friends. She came to visit his studio in Bushwick, and then went to see his exhibition “Egyptian Violet,” which featured, among other works, a life-size oil painting, rendered with Symbolist intensity and high-classical technique, of Prince on a motorcycle. Soon after, she asked McKinniss if he would paint a portrait of her for the cover of her forthcoming album, “Melodrama.”  

Currin

Weyant

Leibnizian fuzziness, flavor of the month. Like Hickey, Indiana sees what the wants to for whatever reason. He uses McInniss as material to talk about his own interests. Obviously there's nothing new in having a feeling for and understanding, or a fantasy, of Fantin-Latour—or  Leibniz and Joan Didion.  Peter Saville saw it in 1983. It's what others recognized in Seurat, a better artist so harder to steal from, a mechanical blankness, a passivity that Seurat could describe but that Fantin-Latour could only manifest. Fantin-Latour is why we have Richter, as Seurat is why we have Warhol. Think also of Degas, like Seurat: painters who responded to photography without being defeated by it. It took years for Maureen Gallace to accept the fact that she's a landscape painter. She started out thinking of her work as formal and conceptual. She needed to lie to herself to do what she wanted to do. Embracing kitsch, or lack of affect, is a defense mechanism, steeling yourself for mockery. Fear made her early work simple, almost Platonic anti-landscapes, complex and interesting. Now that she's out of the closet and painting at the beach, the work is maybe better but also more simply small.

I don't remember the first time I wrote that the irony of pop art came out of a need to find a way to make figurative work and get away with it. Like Robert Wilson—"I  didn't mean anything by it."—or T.S. Eliot. McKinnis is repeating work from 25 years ago, but most don't know, and those who do don't care.  Gagosian now represents both John Currin and a fan, though his female follower is even more a follower of the sexually aggressive Balthus while Currin is voyeur as cuck. But he's also a committed academician. Look at the sleeve on the female figure, The Penitent, from 2004.  I'm 

Currin

sure he can talk for hours about both Titian's paint handling and the chemistry of his paints. It's been interesting to watch his skills mature; he's fully committed now and it shows. But as I said to the girls at the desk a couple of years ago, all the show needed was a portrait of a naked black man with a 10 inch cock. That got a laugh. 

A few years ago at Christie's a young thing in the sales department saw me looking at a Gauguin monotype, one image repeated on a page, saying not too pertly, "It's a nice Warhol". I looked at her, surprised. She smiled. We both smiled. Her bosses may have told her what to to say; it may have been her idea. She may have had an intuitive understanding of what it meant to find the human behind the mechanical as opposed to the mechanical behind the human. Or maybe she was being paid to respond equally to both. At the moment I gave her the benefit of the doubt; that's why the young and attractive are out front. I wished I'd had the money for dinner if not the Gauguin. I would have asked. But at this point Indiana and others who also should know better are just scraping the barrel, or trying to get laid. 

I've said a few times that over the last 25 years I've had more interesting conversations with art dealers than artists, and even more so with gallerists and employees of auction houses who dealt with a broader range of art: 19th century to contemporary, or even older. If I didn't love the good shit I wouldn't be talking about the bad. And what annoys me almost as much as the ignorance that now rules the "artworld" is the "leftist intellectuals" and academics who refer to art—and film—as if it didn't mark them as absolutely bourgeois, and conservative.

Of course I'm a conservative. All leftists are conservatives. Anarchists are liberal idealists.

Untitled, (PCL), 2008, Transparency on lightbox, 96"x 96"

Untitled, (Bat), 2010, Transparency on lightbox, 90"x120"