'I came to reinterpret the silences I had taken to be philosophical and the gaze I had thought meditative as expressions of his mental disarray. It's one of the great mysteries of the French intellectual scene how this man of unbridled insanity could have taught us rigour and rationality.'
This cat has been in this state for two months. I first noticed it near the front of my apartment building in the parking lot that I traverse at least twice a day to reach the coffee shops. It no longer reeks.
If the willingness of the well-endowed blonde Texan, whose path I happened to cross while the former was on a collector's shopping trip in Dubai for the benefit of her Mayfair townhouse, to accede to the prices of pieces by artists like Farhad Moshiri in Mona Hauser's XVA Gallery can be taken as an indication, the market for 'Middle Eastern' art is, one might justifiably say, 'well-stimulated.' And now, after the Bonham's auction in Dubai in March, Moshiri is 'the first Middle Eastern contemporary artist whose work has sold for over $1 million.'
Dubai—the city to whose sudden growth the surgent interest in 'Middle Eastern' (though largely Iranian) art owes its gratitude—is to Iranian talent what Portland is to Afghan poppy. And, yet, you know all of those old-fashioned criticisms—articulated yet again in Jed Perl's recent review of Koons at the Met and Murakami at Brooklyn—about artists whose only real attribute is self-promotion? You know, where one is too frightened to pull back the Ray Bans for fear of revealing backlit, Swarovski-encrusted dollar signs? Well, I can't get them out of my head when I'm looking at a Moshiri piece. And none of this is helped by the fact that Moshiri cites, but of course, Neo-Geo and Koons and Murakami as his forebears and that the artist has refused to go to the trouble of placing a figleaf before his fixation with 'the market' and, um, cash, and that—oh yes—his work actually does come encrusted with Swarovski crystals.
So what if Moshiri's art is gross? It's his party and he can 'play with the idea of marketing and commodification' (his words from this interview) if he wants to. The typical Moshiri piece consists (if we use the $1 million specimen depicted above) of little Farsi maxims and words plucked out of Hello Kitty's dictionary (technically, the word, 'ashq, is Arabic, not Farsi, and suggests a stronger variant of 'love'). And, yes, a typical Moshiri piece might come with 'stunning Swarovski crystals and glitter on canvas' (Bonham's words). Isn't that, but of course, the point? Why, the joke would not—could not—be on the artist himself, right? 'After all, the idea of making work that is about the packaging of art has been there since pop art,' Moshiri assures us. But should the audience not expression apprehension when the disjuncture between jokester and joke ends up looking pretty flimsy? And must we really go through this yet again, only this time in a more 'exotic' location? So long as we have artists like Haerizadeh, why bother?
Perhaps it should be taken as an especially portentous sign that Scalia's dissent in Boumediene v. Bush was bereft of the justice's traditional portentousness, and was, rather, drab and lifeless in a fashion most uncharacteristic of our favorite justice (for whom any occasion to furnish his text with a literary flourish makes weak the berobed knees). Portentous indeed. For Scalia, I would suggest, was sexing down his text to fit the dissent's constituency: By which I of course refer to the national security fetishist crowd.
The polemical portion of the opinion—for, as is his "usual practice" (Scalia's words there) the justice's dissents are typically accompanied by a foreboding exegesis on a given decision's "disastrous consequences" (again, his words)—followed the contours of the B-Movie, all fear and flash, zombies lurching, bullets flying, while, at the end, resembling something pretty crude and pandering and unnecessary. After all, Roberts had already cited the decision's "modest" (and, therefore, unnecessary) result, effecting as it does a mere administrative shift from a congressionally-mandated review process under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to a yet-to-be-determined appellate review process in the federal courts. Scalia busies himself with the apposition of the Suspension Clause, a question itself inapposite given his ultimate conclusion that its burdens, were, in any event, met under the DTA.
And yet it becomes difficult to ignore the dissent's polemical ambitions and still harder to dislocate it from the political scene: "America is at war with radical Islamists," Scalia intones in the first line of the polemic. He proceeds to cite "the enemy" twice in the same paragraph and to set forth a questionable history of the US's engagement with "the enemy," beginning with the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon. Sounding like a greater bore than Nietzsche on the subject, he continues: "It has further threatened attack on our homeland" and, elsewhere, "our countrymen" and "our Armed Forces." So, here we have these mutterland flourishes, written, in an unusual gesture, with a rhetorically yielding hand, and, the next day, we have McCain characterizing the ruling "as one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."
How are we to reconcile this unbecoming effort to excite the sympathy of a rather unbecoming constituency—this convenient provision of election season soundbites ("The Court's decision most certainly will cause more Americans to be killed")—with the justice's oft-proclaimed belief in political restraint? Not easily.
I stared up at a swirling fluorescent light snickering for three hours when I read this bit from a 2002 interview with Donna Tartt in The Guardian:
She describes how her great-grandfather, the great patriarch of her family, 'had a nearly unlimited faith in the magic of pharmacy' and has spent the last years of his life constantly dosed up with antibiotics, 'believing them to be a kind of healthful preventative, or nerve tonic.'
Wh-wh-whither Miss Tartt? Apparently penning a Daedalus and Icarus entry for the Canongate Myth Series. While 'tis sweet to have us a noveliste who avoids pathologically the status of publishing factory...just do the third of the five already!
The academic bookstore: Never to buy—online and used is of course the way to go—but for wandering and wallowing when in need of bibliographic inspiration and a setting less grave but nearly as abundant as the stacks. Unfortunately, these oases must be shared with the people who actually run the places—invariably insane seventh-year graduate students who might pen something like this. The worst offender would have to be Columbia's Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth), where the sneer I received several years ago when buying Writing and Difference from the clerk has left a remarkably vivid psychic etch. True, blank stares from the clerks at popular bookstores are infuriating: I'll admit to a bit of blood boiling when, in Mumbai, I was trying vainly to locate a copy of Écrits, but before I could utter past the 'La' the request had been eagerly filled in by the clerk as '...nce Armstrong!' But at what price must we suffer those who commit what is, of course, the worst sin of all—seriousness?
Meanwhile, a dispatch from the front lines in Berkeley (italics mine):
Hi Henry,
I spent a pleasant 20 minutes in the Berkeley UC bookstore browsing the shelves and noted the many structuralists titles and Frenchmen with whom i have become so intimately familiar over the past years of intense proximity (I have several critical texts in storage) but ended up buying two books on Buddhism and another one on Piracy under Elizabeth I. She was quite the Pirate Queen you know. Just ask the Spanish. There is however little i need add to my knowledge of the Structuralists who have done so much undermine and indeed subvert my comfortable Logical Positivism and Wittgensteinian Ordinary Language background. I did however purchase Leo Strauss' book Tyranny which I have been meaning to read for years. "Are these all for you" inquired impudent coed at the counter. My answer was unmemorable and need not be repeated but it is a wonder anyone reads anything any more.
Hope all is well with you.
Love,
Dad
Buried under the criticism—mostly from the subject and the Middle American parents of her constituency—surrounding the Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair shots of Miley Cyrus are the following: (1) It's Leibovitz's best work in a long while. The photographer has been losing the war against quality control for the better part of a decade: Consider that appalling, pre-Raphaelite-nightmare of a series of celebrities-cum-Disney characters she's been doing. (Leibovitz managed to bring even further into relief David Beckham's perennial unsexiness.) (2) The photos are marvelous gothic chic—those smeared reddish lips, the contrast in which her darkened hair and lightened skin are awash, particularly as against that sheet—and actually work with Leibovitz's obsession with the color green. (3) They take a teen star who is neither particularly attractive nor particularly interesting and succeed in making her appear to be a bit of both. (4) The star's protestations and the coverage of the photos have relied upon the trope of the dominating Lesbian sophisticate de-flowering an innocent. (5) How can we but be pleased?
