Some art works operate like a bluff.  They challenge you to take them up on their offer – to call what they are as art and agree with their assigned cultural value.  While there is the concept and theory that blankets the object in its meaning, at the core of an object is the viewer’s receptivity. For artist Jennifer Mills, every action by the viewer must be countered by an act on her part to maintain her role as saboteur.  As her art practice encompasses all aspects of the art machinery (concept, production, exhibition, viewer) the work is not finished until we have measured and documented the audience and their actions. As part of her practice, all Mills’ objects are priced at $10 or below to counter the art industry’s valuation of works.  Specifically for the series Art Object, the artist offered the entire set of objects for a more significant sum.  Los Angeles Gallerist Steve Turner negotiated an undisclosed sum below the offered price and purchased the set.  Herein lies the criticality behind the series of these moves:  the viewer offers up a negotiated price challenging the artist’s stated worth, the artist agrees or disagrees and a sale is either gotten or forgotten.  Quite often this is the end of the artist/patron cycle in the 21st century.  But with Mills, the cycle expands to reflect on the business of art. Ms. Mills continues her series of detournements in this instance by generously offering the Gallerist a “gift with purchase.” She has co-opted a well-known promotional gesture within commerce – the offer of additional items for free.  In this case, the offer consisted of mice to go along with the mousetraps which were the art objects purchased.  For the artist, the circle of meaning...

Hello Nora, We haven’t communicated in ages, and it’s entirely my fault, but I would love to know how things are going. Email me your phone number because I’ve lost my phone book. Things here are much the same: taking classes (one with Art Historian Rosalind Krauss that’s quite good), attempting to absorb something of this city, since I feel like my time here is a protracted goodbye. I’m not returning next year, but I’m not sure I can say more than that, although it might have something to do with some sort of naive adolescent appeal made to me by Kerouac while I was sitting on a strange toilet in the middle of the night. I can’t avoid vulgarity, see? And I’ve always thought, probably mistakenly, that you were too good for it — by mistakenly I mean not that you’re too good for it, only that I never should have presumed to make a judgment about it one way or the other. Have you talked to Max? She was in town recently. I ran into her in the Bowery. She was wearing a chainmail dress, chatting with some art people. I guess she gave up smoking. But I thought she did that a long time ago. I asked her about you, which amused her. We should get together, she said. Her eyes still have that wide-apart look I look for in a sister. I hope that you’re doing well. Am I out of prayers? Simon...

  Kate Durbin was robbed.  It was a subtle theft, one that occurred with a polite denial on the part of the thief.  Corporate theft of an artist’s intellectual property is something that happens often and very difficult to prove.  The complete story about this thievery can be read here. What transpired after is her performative challenge, “N O Bikini,” and the derogatory comment left on her post – which leads us to the dinner conversation via Facebook. What kind of conversation is the run of texts on Facebook?  Is it idle chatter?  Banal, overused idioms that have polluted our daily conversations?  At times, comments on a Facebook post can become criticism (even in its ad hoc state) and eventually, by nature of its form, a social commentary.  Given these parameters, I give you a little dinner conversation.  Brought to you by Facebook.     Kate Durbin will be performing Prices Upon Request at our invitation only event, Zg Presents on June...

I was a freshman in college when, after a season in the Chicago White Sox minor league system, Michael Jordan returned to professional basketball. A native Milwaukeean – and congenitally partial to the underdog – I had always hated Jordan, and in the years that followed, during which he would win three consecutive championships for the second time in his career, I would continue to hate him lustfully. But every time a Bulls game was televised in the weeks after his 1995 comeback, my best friend Jesse and I would get on our bikes and head over to Jesse’s Uncle TJ’s house, some eight or ten miles from campus, to watch. It takes a lot for a pair of college freshmen preoccupied with forty ouncers they can’t finish and girls they don’t have a chance with – kids whose universe is contained to a collection of dormitories on the shores of a small lake in the middle of southern Wisconsin – to bike ten miles, up hills and through traffic, into the world of houses and regular people with kids and jobs. But that’s how badly we wanted to see Jordan play. Not because we liked him, mind you, but because there would never be another basketball player like him, and we did not need the help of hindsight to know it. That brings us to LeBron James, the one who famously took his talents to South Beach this season, leaving behind the Cleveland Cavaliers team for which he’d played his entire NBA career and, in the process, a state’s worth of historically star-crossed sports fans who, calling themselves “witnesses” (at the encouragement of Nike, LeBron’s earliest and most steadfast sponsor), had supported him with a faith of which he turned out not to...

  Catullus, Poem 64 A wonderfully embroidered cloth sets forth the mythic deeds of various men of old.  It illustrates the wave-loud coast of Naxos, where Theseus and his swift ship vanish from sight, and Ariadne, in most grave distress, awakes deserted on the lonely shore, and gazes after her uncaring lover.  The graceful band is gone from her golden hair, her light dress hangs, her girdle slips from her breasts—all scatter, falling from her in the waves.  Indifferent, the lost girl gazes after Theseus. This warlike man had earlier gone to Crete, where Princess Ariadne, seeing him, had felt a flame burn down into her bones.  And when bold Theseus went to fight the Minotaur, conquering the beast, and laying its body low, it was her wander- ing thread that showed to him the exit from the devious labyrinth.  Then, when Ariadne chose the love of Theseus, he carried her by ship to Naxos’s shore, only to abandon the princess while she slept. Now in her grief she climbs the sudden cliffs, to view the vast ocean, calling out her plaint:  “Theseus, in return for saving you from death, you leave me prey for angry beasts and birds.  No shelter, no escape from the encircling waves, no means of flight, no hope.” But as these words pour from Ariadne’s breast, and as she gazes after Theseus’s ship, the cloth elsewhere portrays the young god Bacchus racing amid a riot of spirits and satyrs, burning with love to give the Cretan girl.   WARBURG                       BACCHUS/VOLCANO                       RUINS                       ARIADNE SCULPTURES                    ...

Dear Nora, It is with no small degree of trepidation that I respond to your query. Not only has it been too long between letters (I’ve not been completely idle…working on the long, literary defense of my love for champagne, cocaine, La Perla lingerie and soccer for you to read at my funeral. Did I leave anything out? I can’t think of a better way to drop the news that I’m completely made up, that I’m nothing. “We cool?”), but written history has all of the helpless tenacity of an insect splayed on a liquid inversion of sky. And if I remember correctly from our last conversation, we were talking about finches, yolks; wondering what we do with all those nuts. You presented a few choices, and here’s what I came up with: I hate Brazil nuts; Gary Busey is too obvious an answer; the lug nut, though unappreciated if not out of fashion (in both expression and thing-ness), I must say, is not a contender. So I’m going to go with what I know and say “Deez Nuts”. To get a jump on the prosecution: so much has been misunderstood about the boy. My condition prohibits a full-scale induction of the past, and neither do I want one. If it is as you say, and your graduate work aims to save Simon from the speculation of cynics, anarchists and other smart sets of perverts and miscreants, then I will help you, as your patience stands upon the digressions of the up-late type. The boy was as much of a brother to me as I will ever be permitted to know, and public record has done nothing but disavow the filiation by making me out to be some lovesick chippie, who dips her quill...

And then, despair. Despair which is, I suppose, the best word I can summon with which to describe that suffocating sensation of a certain familiar combination of anger, frustration, and helplessness. Despair like a reoccurring dream in which you feel like you want to hurt somebody, like you want to hit somebody, hard, but at the same time know even before you try that all your blows will be glancing. Or – the other side of the coin – like after a punch to the gut, when all you want to do is the one thing you can’t do, which is breathe. If you have been following the news out of Wisconsin – the state that, though I have not lived in it for over a decade, I stubbornly insist on continuing to call “home” – then you probably know already that the recent State Supreme Court election, which pitted incumbent justice David Prosser against a former Assistant State Attorney General by the name of JoAnne Kloppenburg, was more than just that. Indeed, because it was framed this way by the media, and by tens of thousands of riled activists, and by the in- and out-of-state interest groups that poured millions of dollars into run-up advertising campaigns, it was also something of a referendum on newly elected Republican governor Scott Walker’s ongoing efforts to sterilize the state’s public employees’ unions by stripping them of their right to bargain for anything other than base wage increases commensurate with inflation, which it to say, for anything at all. Prosser, it so happens, was not only Republican Speaker of the State Assembly in an earlier incarnation, but today counts himself (and is counted) as one of the governor’s political mentors. Kloppenburg, on the other hand – well,...

Lost skate-key: Have you put down your copy of Franny and Zooey yet? Remember Nora, exercise restraint with highlighter use; otherwise, others will suspect you of soft thinking. It’s been a long time, maybe I should slow down. So my new place in NYC…there’s an orange wall. There are barking doggies on my answering machine to scare off the unwelcome and the shabby. Well, it’s all part of the installation that is my apartment. The doorman of Sara’s old building is a tiny Cuban man who changes out of his security uniform at the end of his shift into this incredible hat and suit ensemble. Anyway, Sara asked him if there was any discarded furniture in storage: ever since, we’ve been inundated with the sorriest collection of orphaned, wilting lamps, backless embarrassed chairs with only makeshift bungee-back to show for it, a little nightstand that used to be blue, and a wheeling TV stand that groans with old age on its rusted wheels. My posture is starting to show signs of influence. The summer is here, although I still have two papers to write. It looks like I’m going to be here for most of it, since I have no money to go anywhere, and I’m two months behind on my rent. Plus, I’ve got that invigorating job as a copy-editor for Financial Investor. I’m feeling a little bit trapped in every way. I blame Max and the long weekend visit to Paris. She insisted we spend the birthday together. She knows two things, maybe only two things about me: I’m confused about what I’m doing, and that I’ve been visited by the middle-age version of me with a pony-tail and a tropical print t-shirt, a sort of conscious Doonesbury character. She picked me...

April 30 – May 20, 2011, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sullivan Galleries Marcel Broodthaers had his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968): a museum of his making to counter the art system of the 20th century. It was groundbreaking but quite frankly, analog in comparison to our current state of art and commerce. The system of making an artist and art object from the MFA program to art star, in five steps or less, has gone beyond the level of institutional critique that begins at the museum. Our present art institution runs at hyper-speed, in multiple formats with a viral reach – how to counter the system that has become corporatized and co-opted beyond measure? For Broodthaers, there was still a means of engagement that could be offered up as something counter to the object of his criticism. Today, we are all participants in the system; even those who claim to work from outside the system are actually part of it. All spaces and stands of rebellion have been accounted for. How then to critique? Enter Jennifer Mills, “graduate art student” at SAIC. Through a conflation of her role as both artist and student, Mills performs an elegant double entendre. Part of an ongoing series of investigations on art, commerce and the artist/patron relationship, Mills performs the student in the SAIC program with the result that her MFA thesis exhibition comments on the art system machinery while also producing art objects for consumption. Mills’ position in the art machinery is one that wholly embraces her trajectory – she is aware of how every facet of the system in which she is a part of works to validate her as an artist. Mills does not act to counter this system; rather,...

Nora, I keep waiting for you to find me…obviously, not the best policy. It is perhaps helpful, if small consolation, to note that I’m someone who has trouble changing his trousers…I’m sorry that things aren’t well, and I’m angry at someone about your trip if it’s truly cancelled. I’ll call you later tonight. Things are fine. Sometimes, when out for a walk, maybe, among muted winter buildings, a gasp! Of indiscriminate longing or loneliness; I’m never sure. I wonder what would happen if your beauty were to settle finally about your shoulders — something you share with Caliphurnia, slipping naked from the Pacific, and turning amniosis out of her tresses. WHEN that song begins to churn forward suddenly I roll my eyes like I’m trying to figure out How all of the air left the room. She smiles like I said something to the contrary; it says study my canines. He says, I did love you once. She tells me about teaching English in Patagonia to anyone who would give a fuck and two-steps her cigarette. You suddenly understand why it might be thrilling to copulate in a graveyard. He fails to bay. The tide turns when you take the cigarette to your forearm. What comes back full force in the moving final motive of the black sail and the white. The song is the promissory note of an absence. I pin myself to it like an airplane’s black box. In spite of everything, someone’s not on the guest list And what sad piano fingers you have (Did you see Penélope at the Oscars? ¡dios mío!)...