The Downward Spiral : Popular Things

You can run but you can’t hide. Dean Kissick on NFTs and the pervasiveness of mundane art.

Where to begin? It’s New Year’s Eve. Dinner at a film director and an art director’s place on the Upper East Side. Roast lamb and Salad Olivier. You ask the girl sitting next to you what she wants from this year. She says she wants to make a lot of money. So does the person sat next to her, and the next person along too. This wasn’t what you expected to hear in a pandemic: that everyone planned to get rich. She’s going down South to work the strip clubs, and they’ve both become Robinhood traders.

The ball falls in Times Square. The clock ticks over. It’s a bright new year. Your ex-quant friend drives three of you down to a millionaire’s TriBeCa coke loft in his vintage red Alfa Romeo. You’re racing down Broadway with the top down and all the lights turn green for you, they glow for you. The loft’s full of artists and artworks. The evening’s hosted by your friend who used to be a designer at Celine and now couriers drugs. Plates of lines are going around. You’re handed some ecstasy, you’re talking to a Marxist on the floor, you’re introduced to a former America’s Next Top Model contestant, you’re accelerating. It’s 2021. Cryptocurrency’s exploding. DeFi (decentralised finance) in particular. Robinhood traders on r/WallStreetBets nearly take down a hedge fund. It’s Valentine’s Day and you’re alone. The European Central Bank tweets, “Roses are red, Violets are blue, We’ll keep financing conditions favourable, ’Til the crisis is through.” Cryptocurrency’s exploding again. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in particular. The Nyan Cat meme goes for $590,000. The “ape in a fedora” CryptoPunk goes for $1.54 million. An animated gif of Trump’s bloated, naked corpse by someone called “Beeple” goes for $6.6 million, setting a new record for any Millennial artist, dead or alive. Christie’s launches a two-week sale of one of his works. It closes tomorrow and has already broken the record again. Current bid: $9,750,000. The US senate passes a $1.9 trillion relief bill. You’re in Starbucks following the floor stickers that tell you where to stand, looking at the price of each cookie, mind RACING, worrying, thinking, Hyperinflation! Michael Burry is right!

 

 

Five stylishly dressed teenage boys stroll down Prince Street extolling the US dollar’s hold over the Swiss economy. A whole other economy based on trolling, memes and network effects is appearing. Now everyone’s a day trader, everyone’s a drug dealer, everyone’s an art director for a weed delivery service, everyone might be the next top model, everywhere’s a secret coke loft, now everything can be traded or shared online; money printer, bad figurative painter, subreddit, museum gift shop, NFT minter go brrrr; it’s the first day of spring; it’s Beeplemania; images and capital have become the same thing; welcome to the total financialisation of reality!

“(Splits Adderall begrudgingly) Is the NFT soul discourse a valid thought experiment”, asksfilmmaker Charlie Curran, “or the symptom of a culture industry … enviously not understanding money dreaming up the wildest asset they can imagine pumpable?”

Before Christmas, the only uncertain-times-era art world innovations I could think of were online art fairs and anonymous Instagram callout accounts. Now more innovation has arrived, and it’s come from outside, from the spheres of online culture and cryptocurrency speculation. Crypto has its origins in a mistrust of authority in various forms, from government-backed fiat, to the banking system, to the financial industry. Now it’s also challenging art world elites.

 

 

 

THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: POPULAR THINGS

by Dean Kissick

 

 

https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/downward-spiral-popular-things-dean-kissick

 

Voyage around my Room

Voyage around my Room

The particular exhibition embarks from Virginia Woolf’s legendary essay “A Room of One’s Own”, written in 1926, and its relevance to newly introduced sociological and political concepts like digital feminism and the #metoo movement. The room (ma chambre), personal space as described in Xavier de Maistre's classic book "Voyage Autour de Ma Chambre" (1794), where the title derives from, as well as concepts such as privacy, autonomy and self-expression are key points of reference to the exhibition works created by international contemporary artists and writers. The exhibition attempts to initiate a new discourse on the notion of room and personal space in continuation to the discussion that originated in classic essays and works of literature.

How to guarantee conditions of contemplation to the older feline population, 2006, wood, 310 x 165 x 52 cm

Participating artists: Sophia Al Maria, Theodoros Chiotis, Dora Economou, Philomena Epps, Jeanne Graff, Juliana Huxtable, Dimitris Ioannou, Sharon Kivland, Sylvere Lotringer, Jonas Mekas, Maro Michalakakos, Eva Stefani, Amalia Ulman, Kostis Velonis 

Exhibition curator: Kika Kyriakakou

Duration: March 18 – April 21, 2019
Location: Athens Municipality Art Center

Athens World Book Capital 2018 City of Athens, of which major donor is Stavros Niarchos Foundation, organizes the group exhibition “Voyage around my Room” in partnership with the City of Athens Cultural, Sport & Youth Organization (OPANDA).

Guns, class war and a transvestite cat: what a new Beatrix Potter story reveals about the author

A Beatrix Potter story written more than 100 years ago is to be published for the first time, introducing a brand new character: Kitty in Boots. 

The tale, of a gun-toting cat who leads a double life, was found near-complete in an exercise book – and shows Beatrix Potter at her darkest, says Gaby Wood

Doppelgängers and transvestites, guns and gangsters, secret lives: these are not the first things that come to mind when considering the work of Beatrix Potter. Yet the creator of Peter Rabbit and Hunca-Munca once wrote a story that featured all of them. The Tale of Kitty in Boots was written just before the outbreak of the First World War but never published in Potter’s lifetime. Over 100 years later, Penguin Random House will finally release what they describe as Potter’s “24th Tale” – a book that may turn everything we think we know about her on its head.

By Gary Wood

More : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/guns-class-war-and-a-transvestite-cat-what-a-new-beatrix-potter/

Cat's Cradle

Incontro ravvicinato

Corrado Calabrò

Introducing Objectivism by Ayn Rand

The following is a short description of Objectivism given by Ayn Rand in 1962:

At a sales conference at Random House, preceding the publication of Atlas Shrugged, one of the book salesmen asked me whether I could present the essence of my philosophy while standing on one foot. I did as follows:

Metaphysics: Objective Reality
Epistemology: Reason
Ethics: Self-interest
Politics: Capitalism

If you want this translated into simple language, it would read: 1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.” 2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” 3. “Man is an end in himself.” 4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

If you held these concepts with total consistency, as the base of your convictions, you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your life. But to hold them with total consistency—to understand, to define, to prove and to apply them—requires volumes of thought. Which is why philosophy cannot be discussed while standing on one foot—nor while standing on two feet on both sides of every fence. This last is the predominant philosophical position today, particularly in the field of politics.

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Copyright © 1962 by Times-Mirror Co.



Ayn Rand and Thunderbird, 1964

The cats' strike

The cat's cough wakes him at night.
He turns in bed, gets up.
Puts on his dressing-gown because it's cold.
Puts on his slippers because he's barefoot.
Slowly he approaches the window.
Drawing open the curtain, stares:
Below,
In the street,
As far as Republic Square
Thousands of phosphorescent flares
Thousands upon thousands of cats
Thousands upon thousands of raised tails.
Calmly
He closes the curtain.
And returns to his warm bed.
Yawning
He mutters:

Novica Tadic
(translated from the Serbian by Michael March and Dusan Puvacic)

Folk Indian Cats

The Book "I Like Cats" emerges from the brushstrokes of the best-known tribal and folk artists of India. Silk screen-printed by hand, this book features an impressive gallery of irresistible felines across a variety of Indian tribal art traditions, and comes with a framable screenprint. Carrying on in the comic verse tradition, the witty and jubilant poetry-tales of Indian writer Anushka Ravishankar are internationally acclaimed, widely translated, and honoured with innumerable awards. Art by various artists from the finest tribal and folk traditions from across India.
Tara Books

Tiger card

Tom Eckersley, Tiger card, 1982-3

The card is blank inside, it is shaped like a tiger. The tigers body is white and orange, with black striped detailing and facial features and a brown nose.

Botty

Botty shop, Zurich, 2010

Marcel Broodthaers - Interview With A Cat

Ceci est une interview recueillie au Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, 12 Burgplatz, Düsseldorf, 1970

Mask

Toshiko Okanoue, Mask, 1952
Unique collage of magazine images

The Crypt Keeper Søren Psirpsigaard

Søren Psirpsirgaard, 2010

A kitchen cat speaks

Wie würden Sie sich verhalten?
Eine Küchenkatze spricht

For more than a year Gillick has been travelling, researching and developing his project in continuous dialogue with curator Nicolaus Schafhausen. Making extensive use of computer modeling of the existing German Pavilion and following a long period of work on site in Venice the final questions for Gillick circle around models of social behaviour and the problem of how to create new forms of address within loaded ideological sites.

Crucial components of the exhibition were determined during the final installation days. However, the first step of the process was the fabrication of an edition in the form of a model of Arnold Bode’s 1957 proposal for a new German Pavilion.

For the final work, the pavilion is not obscured or hidden. Both the inside and outside of the building can be seen and examined. It has recently been painted white, as part of the general maintenance of the building and Gillick has left it this way. A simple table and bench designed by the artist are sited outside for use by the pavilion team. Every room of the building is open. No part of the pavilion has been closed off or used for storage.

Strips of plastic, like the blinds used to keep flies out of a room, mark the entrance and two emergency exits of the pavilion. Inside, a kitchen-like structure has been constructed from simple pine wood. Lacking in appliances the “kitchen” exists as a diagram of aspiration, function and an echo of applied modernism that resonates in opposition to the corrupted grandeur of the pavilion, which was designed without lavatories, kitchen or any area to rest. The cabinets puncture the doorways leading to the side rooms. The kitchen is in tension with the logic of the building. You could even say it is a legacy of functional modernism that exists to work against the ideology of the pavilion architecture.

Gillick has transferred his own daily working environment – his kitchen used as an improvised studio – to the German Pavilion. Sitting for months in his kitchen with his son’s cat he considered the question “Who speaks? To whom and with what authority?” while the cat tried to disrupt his work. After re-visiting the replica of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen at the Museum of Applied Art in Vienna – which has long been an important marker of applied modernism within Gillick’s practice – he looked for a solution as to who should occupy his Venice kitchen.

For the final work Gillick – with his studio team in Berlin led by Thomas Huesmann – has created an animatronic cat that sits on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. The cat fights against the echo in the building and tells us a circular story of misrepresentation, misunderstanding and desire.



With this in mind the pavilion becomes a site for a self-conscious circling story that never ends. The cat is in the kitchen, the children are in the kitchen.

“I don’t like it,” the boy will say.

“I don’t like it,” the girl will say.

“I don’t like you,” the cat will think.

Venice Biennial, Deutscher Pavillon 2009

The King and the Queen

Le Chat de la Méditerranée

Balthus, painted as a sign for a restaurant around Place de L’Odeon, 1949.