Doomocracy: Exit Through the Gift Shop and Other Visions of the Apocalypse
Dispense with the posing and what are you left with? I would like to be able to answer this question for you, but the pose is the defining feature of our time. Were you to dispense with it, no one could predict the catastrophe.
Like everything else that we are paranoid about failing to recognize about the twenty-first century, street art is not new. It is not a new route to cultural significance. It is not an unlikely voice for counter messages. It is not an entity without a history, or precedence, or a canon.
The soundtrack is The Velvet Underground fed into a loop. There is a knock-knock joke about a writer of fortune cookies; I can’t remember the punchline. I once tried to explain visual literacy to my mother. It didn’t go well. I kept coming back to the issue of profanity. “Skull fucking” nets 2,980,000 hits on bing. The revolution will be sponsored. Is feedback really that interesting?
I like going to the movies alone. I go to the $2 theatre. They don’t really mind if you drink. The venue could have easily housed a porno theatre, but video killed that off. The theatre is properly debased. The seats are broken. The screen is stained with sticky splotches; soda is semen. It is the best venue to watch a blockbuster I have ever found. The star is the green stripe down the screen. Every generation believes that the world will end on its watch; is it ego?
What does it mean to be famous and a recluse? The thought police have declared war on the oxymoron. I can’t remember the last time I saw art in an art gallery. I was promised ‘reciprocal ferocity;’ instead, I get Laura Owens (3,240,000 results). I get inkjet paintings. I get the Kinko’s on Vine.
I want to make a movie about the end of the world. Should I hire a seventy-seven year old with daddy issues (670,000 results)? I really liked Zatoichi (723,000 results), the 2003 Takeshi Kitano (907,000 results) film. I never knew that it was a remake. All I know is that I want to desaturate everything other than the blood. Spaghetti western, soba western, pho western, faux western, pose pretty until I yell cut. Keep rolling while Jean Seberg (586,000 results) lights a cigarette.
Do they make racing seats for fat Americans? The web sites say there is a market. My world is populated, polluted, by a logic that is not internally consistent. One wonders the health risks of a body designed to tear itself to shreds. In my movie, George Cluny will play me. He will model his performance after Rutger Hauer (1,020,000 results).
Once, I wanted to be an artist, but I had no idea what that would mean. Once, I wanted to be important; books would be written about me. Once, I thought I was special, just like everyone else. I may not be rich, but I eat the best food in the world. I keep dreaming about things I have built. I keep waking to things I have bought. In my apse, I have a crèche. Basquiat and Banksy bow serenely. There is a baby wearing an Andre the Giant tee shirt. The three wise men offer gift bags from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. Embossed in my foot, discretely, made in Laos.
I am cooler than you will ever be, but that’s okay, just pretend that Toto never pulled back the curtain.