Oh shit, the Zen Tao Buddhist Aesthetes have united!
Due to some unfortunate and infuriating technical, web-based difficulties leading to malfunctions, temper-tantrums and finally consumption, the -and you will have to trust me on this one- completely amazing and thoroughly critical rant on the recent atrium installation of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s piece, Inopportune: Stage One, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, vanished into thin internet ether. Godfuckingdammit. I am not rewriting it.
Which is a terrible shame considering the amount of effort and hate that went into the posting. Maybe hate is an inaccurate term. How about ‘ire.’ My writing was filled with ire. If you would like to become acquainted with the source of this ire, please visit the NYC Guggenheim website to see the short video on the installation and adoration of Cai’s work, a nine-Chevy Metro, electric light rod monstrosity dedicated to inducing the Upper East Side set into a state of conscience-cleansed drooling. The janitorial staff is busting their asses just to keep the floor clean. And that’s not all, because while visitors head straight for their masseuse after craning their necks for 45 seconds at the suspended automobiles, the museum administration is at the chiropractor getting a readjustment from patting themselves on the back. Again. Next season, maybe they’ll just have one big hand-job fest.
But that is not what I wrote about the first time I wrote about what I am writing about.
It doesn’t really matter anyway. It doesn’t matter how upset I get with Peter Schjeldahl turning all warm and fuzzy about the beauty of car-bombings because Cai is such ‘an elegant and pleasant man,’ so Taoist and not at all ‘defensive about indulging aesthetically contemplative viewpoints on terrorism.’ It will never amount to jack shit how vehemently I disagree with Curator Lady Alexandra Munroe’s assessment of the work’s harmonic transcendence of the violence it is meant to portray. Two tears in a bucket ain’t gonna do squat to help me explain to anyone who thinks the victim of a car-bombing, whether killed, maimed, or related to one killed or maimed gives a spit about what someone who is driven to work at an art museum calls ‘beauty’ or ‘violence.’ Because, apparently, they are way off.
And that is what I wrote about, like a week ago. Before I reminded myself who I was all hot and bothered about. The self-sheltered delusionals at the Guggenheim. Goodnight Guggenheims, certainly you will sleep well.