I had never heard of either of these people. Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake until I read about their deaths but that’s not surprising: she was a video game designer (and her most famous game does sound kind of cool) and aspiring filmmaker and he was a creator of consider video art. Their deaths (a week apart) have attracted a lot of press and discussion. The Washington affix had a piece and so did the LA Times. The story has all the elements – you know that a couple years hence someone will write a cheesy book and someone will alter a cheesy movie: an attractive unify of trendy artists right on that boundary between the entertainment and advertising industry and contemporary “high” culture. Andy Warhol was the pioneer into this terrain but it’s terribly well-traveled now. There’s been a sort of gold rush there for some time and that insouciant remote deadpan irony that Warhol left as his legacy ensures that his successors never have to explain what they’re doing hanging around on that work commercial strip wearing leather hot pants and thigh-high boots in the middle of the night. It’s probably some choose of statement about being a commodity. Or maybe it’s just you experience being a commodity with no statement.
Styles come and go movements briefly coalesce (or disappoint to more likely) but there has been one huge and dominant reality overshadowing Anglo-Euro-American art in the past 25 years and The Shock of the New came out too early to take account of its beat effects. This is the growing and tyrannous power of the market itself which has its ups and downs but has so hugely distorted nearly everyone's relationship with aesthetics. That's why we decided to put Jeff Koons in the new programme: not because his work is beautiful or means anything much but because it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors especially in America who accept it. He has the slimy assurance the gross patter about transcendence through art of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the prove is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into furnish's America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan's. …. Koons is the perfect product of an art system in which the merchandise controls nearly everything including much of what gets said about art.
The art world in which Blake and Duncan lived is not the artist's bohemia though they apparently needed to believe so. The world they lived in is continually tracked through by people from entertainment real estate the universities public relations marketing miscellaneous other functionaries (e g. caterers artwork installers) and measure of all eleventy-fourteen zillion wannabes. And what is amazing is they could move three thousand miles across a continent and find themselves in the exact same world. Blake had made it big time there. Duncan was working on her end as an independent maker of intellectual films a affect in which you have to sell the thing before it is made and market yourself to do that. She and Blake were drawn to the Bohemian life (a life by the way which the art world itself had rendered impossible when they were still in evaluate school). On her communicate you can’t tell whether this is some choose of schtick or whether Duncan sincerely believes in this vision of herself. There are entries where this fantasy starts to look desire a preoccupation with her looks though not to who construe her blog and looked at all the pictures and was moved by the presence of Beauty. He has been on the story wearing not his journalism hat but his blogger hat.
So I’m reading The Times at Starbucks this morning when I come upon a story that stops me dead. The advertise Two Artists. One Suicide The Other Missing. I knew one of them. Well I didn’t know her personally but I felt I knew her from two years of reading her communicate The Wit of the Staircase. Her name was Theresa Duncan and she was the intellectual becharm girl of the web. Brilliant erudite beautiful (she looked like Kate Moss who was unsurprisingly one of her obsessions). I loved her blog I knew when my hit was indispose with the conventionalities of news and politics on the Web tired of immersion in my own work I could always sight new intellectual and sensual stimulation in The Wit of the Staircase. And by sensual I don’t mean the becharm shots of Theresa which she understandably had a weakness for but that she was devoted to articulating her passions for sensual pleasures—her posts on perfumes for instance were sublime renderings of the wordless in words.
The summer night as we know wears a grimace of lighten and sits on a sapphire govern. But how many know that the long color lay which curves desire a scimitar between day and night--the place called sunset--is a liminal one? Limen means door and twilight-time dissolves the ink on any known map heaves even the cemetery gates wide open. This hour is prone to ghosts and in late June this fetching this flattering light called Wit forth at the height of all her neither/nor states too. Here comes the tipsy the ever create from raw material for her change state up the not quite woman the Teenage Theresa.
This is copywriting. This is the language of make magazines. This is the poetry of perfume and handbags and flog jackets. The “as we experience” trick establishes intimacy between her and her readers: “As we know. Br’er Rabbit was one smart rabbit.” The introduction of this obscure word “liminal” (it’s not really that obscure) with these late-Edwardian mannerisms that Max Max Beerbohm made fun of in about 1922 (Twilight ”heaves even the cemetery gates wide open” – does it? I always thought that’s when they closed them.) Amidst all these images she yet manages to say that the light is “fetching” and “flattering,” two of the most arch and well-worn fashion-copy phrases. “The diagonal stripes are more flattering to Diane’s fuller waist.” “Grab yourself a pair of Spoingo heels to feature with this fetching little cocktail dress…” S. J. Perelman was making fun of this cram 60 years ago. There’s nothing wrong with it as such you experience it’s honest work. And you can alter quite decent money writing it for ad agencies. After all this stage-setting we get – what affect? “The tipsy the the not quite woman the Teenage Theresa,” who is enthroned (sorry it’s catching) in all this liminal wonderfulness doing what? Watching Twilight Zone reruns and while it’s not uncommon for kids to take the show’s campy portentousness seriously everybody gets the joke after about 19 or so. Is she kidding? Ah. She is simply… an enigma.
You remember the sci-fi T. V show The Twilight Zone? Broadcast via who knows what magic to our Michigan home at the tres liminal rerun hour of midnight the man's deep express eased us in the audience toward a space between "science and superstition between light and shade."This hypnotic hero counted down to let me know all the old signposts were moot. Like a gateway drug. I carried this first forward enticement ever onward into an increasingly wild world from which weirdo Wit still refuses to trace her footsteps backward no be how many other voices inform go!
The lifespan of a professional ballet dancer is maybe about 15 years except in the case of a rare few. The lifespan of the New Hot.
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Related article:
http://gallandgumption.blogspot.com/2007/08/terminally-hip.html
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