Are we dead yet?

With all the media overhyping the swine flu and officials around the world, including WHO, reacting to the pandemic scare with dire warnings, it is no surprise that family and friends are calling us, freaking out and worrying about our health.

Let me reassure everyone that we are just fine. NYFD black-plague carts are being hauled through the streets piled high with dead bodies, corpses are being stacked up on Madison Avenue very efficiently, the Waldorf-Astoria hotel is being used as an isolation hospital, all Hispanics found on streets get systematically beaten up, disinfectants are being sprayed every 2 hours, and we’ve been distributed gas masks to wear in case we need to break the curfew and leave the house for urgent matters like, say, you have tickets to a Broadway show you bought back in unsuspected times. On top of this, pork ribs are selling cheap these days.

The irony is that the day before the wave of panic started I bought pork chops. It’s funny because I don’t buy meat very often. We have meat once a week with a preference for white meat, and according to my online grocery records the last time I bought pork was a year ago, on Thursday, April 3, 2008: Boneless Center Cut Pork Loin Chop, 1.0”, Standard, Hand-cut, Standard Pack.

The single most adventurous, thrilling experience of the year: having balsamic vinegar and Dijon mustard glazed barbecue pork chops in the middle of a swine flu pandemic outbreak. Take that, WHO!

Art consists of limitation, and the most beautiful part of every picture is the frame

A few months ago an ad on the Internet caught my attention. The New Museum was searching for women volunteers to take part in a contemporary art installation. The living statues were required to go to the museum a.m., take a sleeping pill, get into a bed installed in the exhibition space, and sleep as many consecutive hours as possible.

It turned out the sleeping installation was part of the exhibition “Generation younger than Jesus”, showcasing 50 international artists born after 1976, that we saw last week. First off, the reason why we can still sleep at night is that we were wise enough to visit the exhibit on their free day. Otherwise those 30 dollars would have haunted me for the rest of my life, together with the following (and I quote a review) distasteful, borderline offensive, and cliché in its romanticism of martyred youth (close quote) bullshit:

• A new banana skin is placed anywhere in the exhibition space every day by one museum employee after he’s eaten the banana. Of course we were relieved to see that there's a security guard always hovering nearby to protect the masterpiece. Basically this banana skin is more guarded than the Monna Lisa;
  

• Three platforms displaying personal items from three Chinese guys approached on the street by the artist who offered to buy everything on them for $500;

• Clips of skateboard catastrophes to “rethink the concept of revolution”;

• A Czech artist asked her depression-crippled grandmother to draw from memory items on inventory at a home supply store the woman worked at in Brno for 30 years;

  
  

• The museum’s fourth-floor gallery watcher, who has to wear a white tracksuit, stained with embroidered blood;

• A black steel staircase that only minutes ago I found out to be an art installation. At the Museum I simply thought it was an emergency fire escape.

The event is drawing enthusiastic reviews such as “With nearly all the selections, one gets the sense that these youthful artists are themselves becoming parents. They’re bunch of Geppetos displaying little Pinocchios for the first time”, and “These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime; life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal.”

While attempting to convince myself that looking at nothing is good for you, I started listening to other people’s conversation because, yes, I wanted to know if I was the only one in the room where the sublime had not taken residency. Man telling his friend: “What really strikes me is… the freedom these artists have”. Right, the freedom to add a bunch more crap to the world.

In the end I don’t blame the so-called artists, though. I think of Maurizio Cattellan (see quote below), or the young painter who issues an invitation to his new exhibition that reads “I've got a bunch of crap showing at The Chicago Art Department's”. Most don’t take themselves seriously. Critics take them seriously. Museum goers take them seriously.

Or perhaps the problem is that I’m turning one year older than Jesus. Or 50 years younger than Geppetto.

“Io non mi prendo sul serio, questa è la mia forma di difesa. Ho sempre odiato lavorare. Nella mia vita ho fatto di tutto: la donna delle pulizie, il postino, il becchino, il giardiniere, il cuoco, il contabile, il
disoccupato, perfino il donatore di sperma, a Verona. Ora mi inseguono tutti e rimango stupefatto, perché io sono sempre lo stesso idiota di prima"

Maurizio Cattellan, il cui Papa di cera abbattuto da un meteorite e’ stato venduto per due miliardi.

The Deep South

Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi

April 3-13, 2009