Rotted Pussy

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.

Love Prefers Swarovski

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? 

Looking for the Perfect Flower

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!

Ghostly Lolita: Leibovitz Returns

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?

Original Sins

Antonin Gregory Scalia—who stands at ease among my favorite contemporary authors—is himself such a marvelous character that he will, much like John C. Calhoun, but be remembered affectionately in high school history. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, who refuses to let politics get in the way of her Scalia love, has penned a paean to the Court's rhetor-in-chief that is worth reading. Want to get into Scalia, but don't know where in the man's oeuvre to begin? Try his dissent in the Court's 2003 sodomy case, Lawrence v. Texas; the justice took the unusual step of reading the polemic aloud from the bench.

Meanwhile, Scalia's hermeneutic compatriot but temperamental inverse—why, Robert Bork, of course—has settled his epically ironic $1 million lawsuit against the Yale Club. Bork, a former professor at the law school, had fallen while climbing onto a dais at some alumni event; the late-Catholic convert and famously anti-tort crusader apparently has an injured head and a hematoma on his leg. Peter Schuck, a Yale law school professor, has an amusing surmising in the Yale Daily News:

'But while Robert Bork may have settled his lawsuit against the Yale Club, it seems less likely that he has settled his long-time grudge against Yale quite yet. Last June, Schuck said the lawsuit was indicative of Bork's "resentment" toward the University. "I think his having elevated his defeat into a now 20-year crusade of resentment and fury seems rather churlish," he said. "I certainly sympathize with his anger in having been defeated in his bid for a seat he had every reason to believe he deserved, but I think that this is in the nature of modern-style high Supreme Court nomination politics, and he should get over it."'

Speaking of originalism, if 'justice' can be an undeconstructible condition for deconstruction, why can't the Constitution be the undeconstructible condition for the US justice system? Why, of course the question is garbage. But so—pace late Derrida and 'deconstruction-and-religion'— is the predication.

Upper West Side Collection Devices

An impossibly smart matron—who, now that I write about it, may just be precisely Koons's audience—wrote this to me concerning the world's best-selling extant artist:

'To me, Jeff Koons is as good a self-promoter as Andy Warhol and as shallow an artist. What do you think people see in their so-called art?

Are they hoping for a contact cool?'

The oldest story at Sotheby's. And yet: Who doesn't want it? And also: People don't buy art for their health.

Literature in Reaction

Must one be saved from oneself? What is the excuse? Can we pass off such indulgences with a gesture toward irony? Sensual pleasure after modernism? Is displeasing Terry Eagleton sufficient?

Is Minimalism Moribund?

Sarah Williams Goldhagan, in her review for The New Republic of Sejima and Nishizawa's new New Museum, evidently thinks so. While she finds the project's exterior 'pleasing,' Goldhagan basically determines it to be an unnecessary retread. More significantly, she seems to suggest that the architectural progeny of Judd are spent:

'SANAA's New Museum is a freeze-dried packet of desiccated minimalism. It is in no way miraculous. We are in more trouble than I thought if this is the project that is supposed to restore faith in New York City or point the way toward the future of architecture. The most that can be said in its favor is that in the New Museum, as in the firm's other projects, SANAA raises provocative questions about the value of minimalism in architecture.'

Perhaps programs of radical simplicity, with surprise no longer at hand and maybe impossible altogether, must at this juncture carry rather minimal expectations. Besides, simply because statements literally built have foregone subtlety—the play on transparency and light is quite appropriately apparent, even if one does not read the architects' written statement—that fact does not render them less sophisticated, or, more significantly, less important. Isn't the museum's ebullient appearance on the Bowery's east side enough?