quick Boom thoughts

I’m listening to this book on tape, Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rest of Contemporary Art. Is that what people still call it: book on tape? That’s naming two antiquated technologies into one description of a modern medium. How quaint.

The book is interesting in the perspective it takes on the rise of different artists. Instead of looking at the relationships between different artists and their contemporaries, the book focuses on dealers and collectors in relationship to how different artists’ careers unfold.

I guess I’ve always been a doe-eyed believer in the purity of art: an artist can create their work in an ecosystem of their choosing, insulated from any market that is created around that ecosystem. But behavior around the Art Market can really bastardize my feelings of being a deer prancing around sparkling rivers. The dominating raise of the Art Market speaks to the fact that the newest “ism” of art may be entrepreneurism, having started back in the Warhol days and now exemplified with people using 1031 exchanges and auction houses to inflate the monetary value of their collections of objects that are readily identifiable to the general public as desirable.

This 1031 exchange process that rich people use to create value within their art collection is fucking absurd and the sort of thing I imagine that coked up guy in Diehard really loving to talk about on a first date. I feel like someone tried to explain this to me years ago at a party where there was too much glass, too much concrete and not enough things to fill the space, and I sort of nodded and felt embarrassed for myself. Why was I there?

There’s a club in Berlin called Berghain with a bouncer who is notoriously hard to get past: Sven. He had a tattoo of a ruler on one of his arms and a friend of mine joked that it was to measure how far he was going to fist you before telling you to fuck off. The thing about the mystique of Berghain, and the asshole-ness of Sven, is that it made the place keep a lot of what made it good, even after becoming a place of such hype. The music stayed good. The crowd wasn’t crawling with people just trying to say they had been there. The way to have access to it was to be kicked out a few times but always show up again; learn to speak some German; know the neighborhood; always know who was playing. Because the whole point is that you wanted to hear the music. The point is that you loved the nightlife that Berlin as a whole offered up. There was no way to shortcut this love.

And Boom has an undertone that speaks to the shortcuts that rich people take to be cool. Some of them don’t want to take the time to get fisted (symbolically) by Sven or learn the ins and outs of what makes a good painting, but instead they want to purchase something to signal this knowledge. And in the process boost their net value some.

This is an economic system made to give people something to talk about. That's it. And to be clear these are thoughts around The Market of art not The World of art. xoxo. gossip girl.

there’s only one type of dumpster I’m looking for right now.

She said we would feed on broken concrete using railroad ties as straws and the tops of skyscrapers as forks. She didn’t say this with words. She announced this loudly with her collar and cheek bones being megaphones and fancy electronic displays; her mouth was robbing banks with import cars and many sidearms. There were no breaks and all the lights in the city were green. People cheered from windows as we sped along pulling up yellow dotted lines, flicked onto our backs like mud from a teenagers bike racing through some forest with a precious payload of porno magazines.

Headlamps on foreheads pressed to tempered glass and the stereo is on high; no headlights or windshield wipers, because this is love that reaches back to memories that are carved from Ovaltine and Kix. Roofs of mouths scratched with corn and packed with chocolate: wartime in a mouth with new age medical remedies. Remedies written about in day-glow and typefaces that are water parks and cotton candy.

She was probably there the first time I choked on my own spit or bit my lip while eating soft food, watching from afar, a peep hole, no, a periscope reaching up from the damp part of a tree right behind the bark. She is whispered bass lines in dreams. She was probably that strange bird I once saw behind my neighbors house who’s wings pointed to the sky as if to say “don’t shoot”, but its breast was aglow with something like a gasoline fire.

Oh, she’s a certain tree growing out of a dumpster. You can’t find anything more beautiful in stacked bricks or glass houses like ponds somehow also stacked on city streets. Nothing is better found in the gossiping whirls of alley shadows.

When we have sex the neighbors listen in with the intensity of sports fanatics and I believe that, running to the front door’s peep hole, I saw one person taking notes and a local reporter scurry away.

Shit eating grins picked clean with rebar toothpicks.

twins


playing around with face2face and tensorflow.