THE ARTIST IS PUTRESCENT
The staring approach – scorn merited against those who tranquilly grovel before promised epiphanies. Sit for 45 minutes and some times longer rummaging and scrambling for meaning, surveying a desolate shore…. voyeurs toying in moralistic prostitution. Such is the contract between modern art, its successors, and a society whereby the modes of its own psychiatry are also its results.
The next morning comes, and desperation follows. Drugs for the waking logic – the kind that substitute wellbeing for collapse – an adequate amount is swallowed daily. The private ritual of coffee, of breakfast or not, of getting into the car, onto the subway.
We may have a future together.
The encouragement to participate in such a drama tickles our spleen. By pandering to the desolation of the audience and its tragic sensibilities, this art object subsumes all, as against the exteriority of the more archaic forms and their gestures. Here, we find the logical conclusion for a society of innovative modes of panhandling, a whisper of an unconventional conventionality.
The museum is our church. Exhausted by the daily routine, we have come in droves. The language of the performance – the sermon – provides us refuge within the imprecise and ambiguous. It is an attribute shared by both artists and journalists, whereby the votary is allotted the ability to makes its own prognosis, to repent its own sins, to find salvation of its own accord. There is no doubt anymore that the spectacular value of democracy traverses all cultural indulgences.
A deceit, unbelievable at first, legitimizes with greater ease when its extravagance appears incompatible with its sponsorship by respectable official authorities. Marina merely confirms the necessary trajectory of even the most repugnant luxuries. It is only a matter of time before the surrealist acte gratuit, to fire a pistol into a crowd at random, becomes a healthy over the counter prescription for combating the mass neurosis that constitutes everyday life.We have come to sit with Marina, whore of Babylon, and confess. Speech superfluous, pure form against pure form, the reflection of an emptiness full of value. We have come as the last spectators before the crucifixion. We sit, as apostles at her table, and our nonchalance betrays her.
Our flaccid heads having met -- we dream of Botox. Under fluorescent lights we imagine an army of artists who nobly march in step with the congregation. At least, as motif, we can still infer superior lacerations, while our brothers must be content to sing in a far off repressive land. The consequence has always been emesis, whether choked back into the throat by tolerable acidic ingestion, or violently projected into an era that cultivates the sinister.
~
You are at the Museum today. The trek was arduous and the lines long, but it was worth it to be kissed on the mouth by modern art. To share intimacies in each other's company, if only for a few hours, it has been of incalculable worth for healing your damaged soul.
The embalming of lived experience nourishes itself in the museum-visit and confirms the generalized exoticism of human activity characteristic of commodity society. Despite the labor utilized to build exhibitions, union or not, the hidden asceticism of museum objects mirrors the disfigurement of its patrons.
The lineage of such monuments becomes a fragmented unity of objects constituting a motionless picture of immutable values with an eternally similar meaning, that is, an art history. Indeed, fine art is constantly reminding us that its pieces are merely moments in this autonomous continuum, which can only emerge alongside the cult of originality, of idiosyncrasy, that is, a symptom of the withdrawal from the world into the dominance of the individual and its perceptive capacities.
Art offers only the empty promise of a world, and, in its desolate avowal, the mystified wailings of the lonesome individual echoes an entirely social situation; abandoned to the laws of the inward life of preference, taste, and exchange: a saddening relativism of personal opinion.
What the museum sells, above all else, is the calm, timeless and contemplative moment of perception swaddled in that sterile and noxious suppository called culture. However, the Museum of Modern Art has unduly overused its bleaching techniques, and now what is required is a remembrance of things past; a festering and vomit-inducing valuation.
