My Late Rantsby

The thing about being lazy busy and not having time to blog is that you collect a lot of great ideas just to see them fulfilled by more determined not-busy people.

As such, I should’ve written this post BEFORE the new Great Gatsby movie hit the theaters (I like to remind readers that it’s the new film because Robert Redford version release date eked by a slim 39 years before the new Baz Lurhmann version). Regardless, I think I’m Gatsbied out. I think I felt this way before the movie even came out. Hell, I think I felt this way when I had to reread the novel in sophomore year of my undergraduate studies—and I have a degree in English. I’m tired of the fawning hipster masses and their urges to go to upscale vintage boutiques and buy flapper dresses and pipes and Google what’s in an Old Fashioned and throw a 1920s themed parties where maybe 1 in 20 partiers have heard of This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night, or The Love of the Last Tycoon.

How most people remembered The Great Gatsby before  that guy from that movie about that famous shipwreck made it relevant.

(I’m feeling now that this blog is going to shotgun a handful of gripes I have had lately, so I recommend you stop reading now.)

I don’t know if it’s the familiarity with the obscure (if literature can be obscure in this day) that brings people together to think that they’re all part of a cool group of people who liked or read or saw or heard something before the rest of their friends or society.

I don’t know if it’s the consumer culture of Mad Men and Gilt.com that inspired us to part with our sparse green during a recession that is coming round again like a plague of insatiable locusts now that prospects are looking up.

It’s escapist because even if there is a moral to the book—I mean movie—or a greater meaning, it’s lost in the grandeur of lavish party scenes, indulgent revelers, and a hit playlist. Maybe it’s more than escapist in that it inspires some of us to attempt to live a life we are unable to sustain.

Like that line in the book that I’m sure I’m not remembering correctly because I, like the other 99 percent, haven’t read the book in years, I feel like I’m watching moths drawn to a flame. I guess that makes it sound like I’m judging a lot of people right now… which is good. Because I am. And I will stodgily pelt these passing bandwagons of “culture” with my critical slingshot from the comfort of my own hypocritical and self assuring hidey-hole.

Anyways, I’ll be seeing the movie this weekend with my wife. I’ll let you know how it is.

Have you seen the new Dodge D'art?

In accordance with this blog’s fundamental policy established for the objective and informative presentation of things, stuff, and odd bits, all commentary lacks thorough anything.

This is an art and language post sourced from the Guardian. If you’re not bored already, go find a mirror.

I read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english

You don’t have to.

But read this bit:     

The Simon Lee Gallery in Mayfair is currently showing work by the veteran American artist Sherrie Levine. A dozen small pink skulls in glass cases face the door. A dozen small bronze mirrors, blandly framed but precisely arranged, wink from the walls. In the deep, quiet space of the London gallery, shut away from Mayfair's millionaire traffic jams, all is minimal, tasteful and oddly calming. 

Until you read the exhibition hand-out. "The artist brings the viewer face to face with their own preconceived hierarchy of cultural values and assumptions of artistic worth," it says. "Each mirror imaginatively propels its viewer forward into the seemingly infinite progression of possible reproductions that the artist's practice engenders, whilst simultaneously pulling them backwards in a quest for the 'original' source or referent that underlines Levine's oeuvre."

--Andy Beckett, The Guardian

It goes on to talk about the legitimization of International Art English (IAE), which is not unlike modern English, in the sense that you can read it sometimes. Otherwise it is largely impenetrable jargon. It’s spoken by the elite and if you ever want to break into the scene, be prepared to gush it yourself.

Although I relish in visiting museums and galleries, I rarely talk much, even if I’m going along with someone. What’s that bit about better to remain quiet and thought a fool? If you’re anywhere between 16 and 60, and non-historitative verbal critique is only as good as it’s convolution. I just don’t feel like making the effort. I’m getting married in April… so it’s getting to the point where I don’t care to wear clean clothes unless I’m with the rasion d’etre, let alone impress young birds from the Cleveland Institute of Art.

But the article touches on IAE’s influence as a language… as a medium for thought, for artists. So now, after complicating the language of art, the artists own motivations to push the limit of complication follows. In this age of blah, blah, blah, overwhelming sensory inputs, blah, blah, the speed of information, modernization, it’s just utterly exhausting that there must be so much more added complexity to something as profoundly simple as art: something that should speaks for itself.

Figure 1. The transversal of the natural real and the perceived normality of the soul in the void, as the rapturous transmigration of the physical entity overcomes the maw of stereotyped rebirth imagery. Image most likely subject to copyright.