Tip: Drag paragraphs or the marker to mark progress.
In the future the Starships of the ruling class will be refit by Handmaids and Butlers.
But then we wouldn't have toilets.
Once people get the idea of running water they just wanna add functionality to everything. Including Art.
The urinal is art. What picture? It's a Ready Made. It's the most expensive toilet on Earth made by a Grandmaster.
Ok, so it wasn't "made" by a grandmaster but what was? Marcel went to the Beaux Arts. Probably four times or something. Hell. I went to art school. I know the picture you're talking about. I've never seen one.
I'm surprised it wasn't the first thing on chain after the Search and Destroy.
I mean, by the time the legal battle was over he never wanted to see that little bundle of rights again.
History Painting the Color of Puke. Or was that the only thing you don't have to get
Anyone who can't tell the difference between a urinal and a Gerome is from Fucking Mars
I'm from the richest part of Earth: Switzerland. We make cukoo clocks and knives with more functionalities than blade. We don't draw enough blood in the Alps to make art. We went to Cologne to do that.
You must have me mistaken for someone else
I went to school with Richard. Now I seem to be frozen in some kind of decentralized bank.
I'm not an inmate. Patronage is... a task.
Back when I had a reputation, space travel was a twenty two foot stretch limousine that could play Tetris well enough to make a couple dozen swings up and down the FDR hide to hide the Keys under Doorsteps you must be looking for to have launched this comet
I'm on a 100 Year Command Line in the capital of the 19th century on Mars. What is this life sentence you speak of
The longer the tail the better the chase I say
Are we in traffic?
We must be in line
The line is winding down the block
God
All these parties do are wind down
Betrayal is to be expected
Especially after you turn thirty
People want to see things that they didn't see before. Like... more of you. Your horrible subjectivity is no longer seductive enough to keep them on chain. They want to see credentials. Or a bank account.
People wanted to be a part of something
More than anything else, I think
I think that's what everyone in the Stretch wanted
No, I think they felt betrayed by Kim because she wasn't really a part of anything and neither was Richard. But Richard was a Cowboy. It didn't matter that Kim was a Clean Slate or how much proof of burn she showed, if you didn't have an MFA, you had an MRS, and if you had neither you had some kind of
I don't know
Purpose. Like a function. Something that determined your clothing, the choice of your heels. It didn't have to be a job. In fact, it was more legitimate if it wasn't a job. Julian was a dishwasher. That's what people don't get about those paintings. They were as general purpose as the people who made them, bought them, and used them to make the schools
the schools, you know
the ones with the Blackboard Metaphor I can't read after death that's the only thing
Maybe I wasn't well behaved enough
Anyway, could make a roll of toilet paper look like a red carpet by issuing it as proof-of-entry. "This one time after The Factory" would be the door code for "Remember when the Factory was about money and not guns?"
Yeah. I went to school in Cologne.
I never saw " " Lil Frank or any of his Carp " " in Venice. Or in Basel.
I don't remember
It could have been Miami
How long were the cars where this happened?
If they were shorter than twenty two feet, that was Washington. That wasn't Gagosian. Larry has discretion. He would never have more women than men at one of his openings. Or his soft openings. Or on staff.
He's not sexist.
I sure as hell didn't some emerging "ingenue" with the third most expensive photograph in the world. That baby bull is as locked down as a Swiss Bank Account.
I don't remember. I've slept with everyone in the MoMA and I have grandkids.
You want to know what I was doing when I met whatsisname and Prince Andrew? Probably getting a divorce. Or an inheritance. Or both.
I was probably at the Christie's Evening Sale
I had a debut once
I'm a daughter of the confederate. I don't have a history that looks good. That's why Richard Screwtape Machiavelli and me are best friends.
Ghissy was here to party on the dime of a dozen dead soldiers in a day because she was drip-fed Shakespeare and Women's Lib and money all her lavish life. My parents didn't have money. They had real estate.
Kim says it's hers but Kim...well, Kim. Kim was always losing her job. It was like her phone. So, Richard felt bad for her and told her she could run his "decentralized autonomous zone" off-chain, because his gallery wouldn't touch the thing. It was too high concept. Or too satanic. Helen didn't get off on Derrida. They all just got off on Richard.
I think for Kim it was... she could imagine herself as one of those Upper East Side animals that get to work from bed or something. Spiritual America sounded authentic to her. I thought it was trashy sounding, like off-brand Ralph Lauren. My vote was for Challenger but Richard said it was too soon, which was weird. He always wanted to destroy the most expensive things.
Anyway, I went to school with Richard.
There were a lot of women around him.
All the men were either dead or they were women and a woman was someone who could fit anything into a few inches of cash staked modestly shorter than her heels.
She wasn't sick. She was bored. She was bored like Richard was bored and she'd probably be him if she'd gone to the right art school.
They all wanted out of their parents standards. They were rich enough to pretend they were trash. Ghislaine was too smart to pretend she was trash. But she wasn't wrong. I've seen a lot of girls and a lot of trash and a lot of art and in some parts of the world there's no difference. They like it. It's the only thing that they have a choice to like.
Ghislaine. Go-go Ghislaine. She wasn't at all like Kim. Ghissy was given all the privilege in the world and none of the opportunity. Kim was just dumb at the right moments and so unafraid. She didn't go to Barnard. Men would talk about fucking her like it was the next best thing to work, which nobody believed in anymore either and we hated her ferociously.
It didn't take much penetration. Kim was persistent, a real trip, one of those women who never ages because from the day of her birth the way of her being was immutably inscripted into the event horizon of: single, white, western woman. The kind of woman who knew how to use a computer.
You look young enough to be the nightmare in my kids eye, so if you could Young enough maybe not to hate me. I didn't get cancelled because I went to the same art school as Jeffrey Epstein. They hate me because I'm not up there with Ghissy. I'm Swiss Austrian. I don't need to party with rich people to protect my institutionally sanctioned ego. I let the bank do my laundry.
Richard had a wicked sense of humor. He was always placing ads for her in the lonely hearts newspaper to see if she'd bite and got paranoid that she kept scanning the Voice looking for her "horoscope", but I think Kim was really just in love with the newspaper to be really honest with you.
What do you mean I can't vape in here
This isn't even a real cigarette
I am Joan Katz. I am a columnist, not a housewife. I need a real cigarette. Please. My problem isn't my lifestyle. It's my addiction. I'm an exceptional addict. I can't lie to myself. Please. Give me a Newport and I'll Chew on It.
Kim was the one who enjoyed herself. Helene at Metro Pictures called her Toxic Waste she was so scratch. Kind of pure in this way where was she was just there to have a good time and she wasn't going to end up with her finger caught in the backdoor. So her game included all, and you know how well that goes with disco exclusivity. They like their bunnies tall and told once. Kim was always disappearing into a cab, or coming out of a cab, or losing something in a cab and running up the East Side looking for the One and of course there'd be some Preppy Car Mechanic running after her with the bill.
Are you fucking kidding me I need nicotine -- hey! I see you! give me a fucking Newport please officer god I'm a Native American. I just went to school in Cologne. I've been mined since the age of sixteen for the elaborate sociolinguistic speech patterns that come out of my mouth. You have no idea how much brainpower it takes to think these days. The problem, if you ask me, with the present crisis is that there isn't one.
This doesn't have anything to do with my Choice of Worship. I'm a Sufi because I'm in with the Menils. My family is from Texas. My mother is a War Bride. I have Less Rights Than You So Shut Up.
You could go to a restaurant with Izzy-- not even a nice one-- and she'd send the wine back, ten, fifteen times at the Odeon she sent the wine back and I leaned over and I said "GgsSSSSS! We don't do that at THE ODEON. Look at what we're looking at. Barbarians. It's like you think the money is ***worth*** something****...."
Anyway I've known Kim for a lot longer than I've known Richard. Richard got deplatformed from Metro Pictures. The party was winding down. So was Nixon. It was like after Watergate you might as well buy tickets to a stage fight. It'd be more political.
You know that for centuries more than half the population has been led to believe that the figure of man, alone,, not enough to justify the figure of money as a fixture of life here on Earth. But Kim bought into the spirit of the racket anyway. She wasn't just another Young Blood pop to punk, punk to pop evening junkie. She really loved Duchamp.
What I'd give now for a trip around the block on one of those Prousted stretch limosines. Can I have a glass of water? Do you know the ones I'm referring to?
I don't know what you mean by Human Traffic. You were either in the limousine, on the streets dissolving into some black box underneath a white box the same shape and size, or you were wrapped in a flag. But Jesus Christ those Chrysler Stretch 22s were not going to get any more stylish. Especially when there were eighteen of them all the way down the block like it was Black Out again, and yet-- Disco Survived.
That era is not going to get any longer. But it's been a long time since anyone has given me two shakes of the rabbits tail. Kim had never been in a twenty two foot limo until she met me even though she's going to lie and say it was Richard. Kim is a liar. Richard gave her a .22. I was the one who, you know. Knew all the Wall Street weirdos. I had the keys, she was driving and Richard was somewhere else. He was a time sorcerer. He could take you from zero to a hundred and twenty and then next thing you know you'd be a hundred and thirty-five going through Chinese takeout just for the fortune cookies...
We didn't believe in the stock market. We figured we'd be as down to gamble on Normal People Things as the lottery if the numbers were high enough. Kim pretended to sell real estate because she was never cool enough to sell art. Kim was clever, but Helen was discrete. Kim would call into her own answering machine as an excuse to call her answering machine to see if Richard had called. So, when Richard had an affair with his gallerist and Helen threw him out for what the cat dragged in, Kim took her in. And Kim loved Brooke.
Even from this godforsaken Frozen State on the wrong side of the United Nations Building... they're like a hangover. I can just see them..god awful containers shooting up to the next spot in the ten car pileup winding down from The Factory to the Wedding Court upstairs...
Anyway then they were just ambulances. Not like cool ambulances body took the Solanas Threat too seriously. They figured she was just crazy, and the activists were all crazy.
The neighborhood isn't what it used to be. Neither are the cars. Now it's less like Tetris and more like dial up. What people don't understand about what it was like to fuck a great American artist like Richard is that he was a they balls of Fence after Fence of reflected in the rearview mirrors of the barricading the cavernous dawn choked with traffic rising over second avenue like a death rattle. All those limousines. We used to joke they spend the whole decade just waiting in line to get in, and they'd spend the next trying to get out of Holland Tunnel without giving into the carbon monoxide after the DT's set in... "winding down". Kim was the most avant-garde thing. Probably because she was that naive: as soon as the next catastrophically novel thing hit the bricks, she'd stick her flag in it, announce the party was "winding down" before it even got started. Then it really got started.
Well gosh. It feels like I'm on a 100 year runway or something. The limousines weren't punk but they were just as dangerous as the plywood structures built out along the tiny conduit between Bowery and Rivington, and Kim was just the girl who walked in the door. Usually late, but hey: that's Guernica.
traffic from Museum Mile down to the Shooting Galleries on Bowery. No one lived scholar, on an independent research cruise on a D-girl's pinched dime. Her rolodex was the size of an IBM, only faster. This was a woman who could fall in love at the scene of a crime just to open the floodgates on the grief of it all. I fell in love with her when she told me she sold the most tickets to what we used to joke was our Birth Right and she'd fall in love with Guernica like we were at Homecoming.
I showed a photograph of Brooke Shields on Homesteading Principle, which has a 20th century arc. Kim and I got off on Deep Language. The kind only an Alfred Stieglitz can harness and yield to gold. In the art world, gold is made of... never mind. The worst thing about being the person Prince Andrew phones in on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" (w/Guillotine) is having the worst photograph you ever took blasted out of the continuum of history into the worst version of Universal Studios in the world.
We're talking a hard fork on the grounds of "dynamic perception": for centuries the landed title has in absolute succession shepherded, sans sacrament and sanction, without third party interference, not even our husbands, the avant-garde to the secure shores of Western Passage. It's why CalArts kids pay six figures to funnel institutional sanction into a Shaman in Philadelphia: it's hard to get out of the Slave Trade.
Turner was the first painter who ever made me cry. To this day inviobility of and with a chosen indifference to mercantilism, of the Western the Keys under Doorsteps that in its claim to Real Violence must entrust to The Mids.
Young Then a show of paintings by [[Peter Nadin. Then a group show of Sarah Charlesworth, James Casebere, Louise Lawler, Jeff Koons. That was it. Walter Robinson organized a group show after I split. As far as I know, there's not a single photograph of any of these show or photographs of any of the the openings. There's none of those kinds of memories.
Background
Understanding the $65.5B global art trade can be tricky"Spiritual America" can set the true fan back upwards of seven figures on the secondary market. For Ten Years the so-called intersection of art and technology has been at a Stand Still: the breakneck acceleration that began beneath a Corporate Art hard fork from Main Street to Ground Zero by way of Tahrir to the Supply Side chain of Square Space "market disruption". When the blockchain was B.C., Satoshi was just whichever guy who showed up to fix the plumbing on the most stable seat in the house.
This is a value proposal.