Meat Bags



I blame:

• computers
• forthrightness and decency
• bad strategy
• not complacency or arrogance, but merely thinking that for one moment you can ever stop fighting even when you’ve won
• forgetting that vengeance must be swift
• not knowing that even if you choose a low sodium, organic brand, you still need, every once in a while to open up a can of good fashioned whup ass
• underestimating the stupidity of the American people and the need to bang, bang, bang the drum to get your message across. That is, you must bang the drum to get your message across.
• drum banging required.

This morning my computer couldn’t configure some updates and wasn’t starting. Even though the desktop said “DON’T TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER” as the seconds turned into tens of second and I found myself running out of things to straighten on my actual desk, it was all I could not turn off my computer, throw it out the window, kick it, anything to make it work. Luckily, the configuration finally aborted and the computer started. I see it with my students [I run a private tutoring company], whenever they want to show me something on a computer or do something on a calculator, if something doesn’t work instantaneously, they’ll punch the same button over and over again, demanding it work. There is a panic and an anger that seizes us when our shit doesn’t work; not just when it doesn’t work, but when it doesn’t work instantly. I doubt that people were ever by nature patient, but since the advent of the computer et al. and the possibility for machines or anything to function at the speed of thought, our natural poise/patience has all but vanished. This phenomenon has, of course only served to make us better meat bags.


In sports, it can take years to turn a bad franchise around. It depends on the depth of the problems hobbling the organization, the rules under which the team functions and the management brought in to change things. A loyal fan does not turn on his team if turnabout doesn’t come, say, in spring training. Unfortunately if you run the U.S. government franchise, fans tend to be less loyal and your rivals are playing within and without your own organization. Even your own teammates are out for themselves—like playing for the Knicks under Isaiah Thomas. I’m don’t want to turn into George Will here, so enough with the sports metaphors, but for Christ sake, the guy never really had a chance.


And then he forgot the first rule of sports [ok one more sports analogy]: if you want to beat the Yankees you don’t ever stop fighting. Winning the election was like scoring a couple of runs in the first inning. If you want to beat the Yankees you have to keep the pressure on every single fucking minute because the minute you let up they’ll be up your ass so far you’ll see Jeter’s face in your colonoscopy. No, the only way to beat the Yankees or Fox or health insurance companies is to keep fighting until they are dead, and even if you think they are dead don’t leave them lying there to rot peacefully; no, you must rip their fucking heads off, bleed them, feed their entrails to Bo, sprinkle them with lye and nail gun them into the walls of an abandoned West Baltimore tenement.


Fox and the Republicans knew what tack to take out of the box, “Just say, ‘No.’” They opposed everything on the basest terms no matter how speciously. If Obama tried to help the sick, the poor and the middle class, they called him socialist. If he tried to prop up Wall Street, they called him elitist. If he had cured cancer they would have blamed him for not paying enough attention to heart disease.


If he could have gotten six Democrats to agree to say the same thing, here’s all Obama would have had to have his people do every single minute of every single day. At any point in the day during which they opened their mouths to say anything to anyone, this is all they would have had to say:

Health Care Reform will make everyone richer, freer and more secure.

Say that every day, first thing and then slug it out, explain, spin, finagle. But say that first and often. Go to Tea Parties. Rouse all the Volvo drivers you roused for the election [your base, remember them?] and get them to every town meeting to sell, sell, sell: freedom, wealth and security [never mind actual health]. I swear to Christ it would have worked. But that’s flaming excrement under the bridge now.


Here’s another handy strategy tip: when you’re formulating your administration don’t eviscerate the highest chamber of the legislative branch to do so. You might need them there. Obama’s election took a potent 5% of the Senate out of the Senate, leaving open seats vulnerable to corrupt Governors, special elections and weak fill-ins. Obama, Biden, Clinton, Emanuel and Salazar all left their seats, Kennedy friggin died and the only ex-Senator who could have helped them without leaving his seat, Daschle, was enjoined from entering the health care fray by idiot tax problems. Ugh. No wonder the Senate Dems need a super-majority to so much as requisition toilet paper for the Senate Chambers.


In the end, Obama wanted to be noble. He was noble, but in so doing he gave away the store. I’m a crappy haggler too, but, Jesus, when they let Lieberman keep his committee seats after the election, couldn’t they have wrested from him some agreement not to stomp on the balls of the health care bill down the line? When they gave all our money and our children’s futures to the banks, couldn’t they have stipulated that lending and liquidity be a feature of any return to profitability? The banks ripped us off, recouped their debt faster than even if the economy hadn’t tanked, and ended up laughing their all the way, well, to themselves, all because we couldn’t, wouldn’t or were afraid to stipulate. Leaving these things to people’s better natures will NEVER happen.


My bet is Obama couldn’t stipulate shit. One thing is clearer with each passing day, each nail in the coffin of Health Care Reform and each obscene Supreme Court decision, we are nothing but meat bags. We exist at the mercy of large corporations who have the time and resources to compound their power and advantage with every passing second. It is in no one’s interest for any of us to be healthy or empowered or to have a voice in our government. We exist to ingest food, drugs, entertainment and financial instruments—our mouths, ears, eyes and minds are taken. If they could devise products for us to ingest anally, we’d be getting those too. The more they can keep us plugged into our feed bags, dollar meals and iPods, the greater their power, wealth and influence. Which is why it’s so important for our food and our computers to be so fast—any gap in the intake process and we risk exposure to the world outside our pens: the hemp gray, sunless world beyond the matrix.

Berlin Wall Fall – 20 years on

The wall came down and there was joy upon the land and across the world. Freedom for some from the grip of Soviet communism, and freedom for all from the specter of thermonuclear war. I had lived all my life under that threat, and, in the non-plutonium after glow of Good News, I rushed to East Europe to travel and eventually live and work.

Most of the meaningless utterances that have attended this anniversary are taken up with fatuous discussion of who was more responsible for the collapse of the wall Gorbachev or Reagan [who would win in a fight Plastic Man or the Brown Bubble?]. Few have mentioned the saddest legacy of the fall – the almost instantly nuked peace dividend. Somehow there was meant to be one, and there were some token base closings, but really, how long did it last?

Imagine if, instead of shouldering our way into three hot wars since then we had reinvested that peace dividend. Imagine if, instead of paying all that extra money to the oil companies because of “instability in the region,” we had instituted a—horrors!-- $.50 per gallon national tax on gasoline. Imagine…

If there’s one thing that historic moment taught me, and that I am painfully reliving in this historic moment as we grasp like blind mole rats for some pathetic excuse for national health care, it is this: Preserving freedom in America has come to mean preserving the freedom of our corporate bodies—the national military industrial complex’s freedom to expand its budget and the private health care system’s freedom to gouge the citizens of this nation. Teabaggers and Support Our Troop-ists have been artfully convinced to fight for the rights of Aetna, Lockheed and Merck.

Twenty years ago, as I watched modern history rekindle from my perch in the newly free east Europe [Prague to be specific], I made my peace [somewhat] with the last time history had raised her bloody head in that part of world. I tracked down the remnants of Eastern European Jewry in general and kicked over the traces of my family’s past in particular. At the time, as I watched Fascism and anti-Semitism perk up and stretch their deformed limbs as if arising from under a pile of pig shit after a forty year slumber, there was one thing I took away from that historic moment that I am painfully reliving in this historic moment: like it or not, most peoples get the government they deserve.

In yet another example of why I am the world’s worst blogger, slogger would be the more appropriate term, I submit the following. I started this piece in September 08 when Sarah Palin was having her moment. It has proven a difficult piece to edit and I’m afraid it will never be entirely right, but I must move on...


I Understand Addiction


I understand addiction. I believe almost all of us contend with it in some form or other. Some addictions take less benign forms and may, therefore, seem less benign. However, the true danger in addiction is not in the thing we may be addicted to, but in how we manage our addictions. An addiction to gum could end up killing you—while an addiction to heroin, if very carefully managed, can endure into a ripe old age [see William Burroughs]. The worst though is thinking that you could cured of an addiction as if it is were an external agent, a disease.

I understand the whole Sarah Palin thing and the Bush thing before that. It’s not about white women and family values. It’s about addiction. Or denial. Denial being the core of addiction. Hiding in the thing rather than facing the other thing. We as a nation have been trying to ignore that we are a part of the world for as long as we’ve been a part of the world.

Now, we are mounting one last attempt to deny the reality of the world even as it crashes around us. The Reagan revolution helped us forestall facing that reality. Pushed time back for a generation. As the world has gotten closer to our shores, the need to block it out has become more desperate. We’ve had to hit the vein ever harder and with crazier mixes. We didn’t care where the shit came from or how dubious it seemed [W a man of the people? Sure, I’ll buy it and give me a hit of China White too].

The late David Foster Wallace, who took his life on September12, 2008, will be greatly missed. Motherfucker could write. Infinite Jest had more soul in its jacket cover than The Corrections had in its entire body. A major thread of the book is addiction. One character, so beautiful she has taken to wearing a veil for all the trouble her beauty has caused her, has the added burden of being a crack addict. Her addiction at once became so intense that she took to picking over the fibers of her carpet for stray white specks—whether or not these specks proved to be crack didn’t matter, she’d smoke them anyway.

Sarah Palin is the Reactionary Right’s last speck of crack dug out from the wall-to-wall carpet we laid in our mildewy rec room 30 years ago. Rather than hitting the pipe, a certain strata of America started taking regular hits of god and guns [yes, that line] and that particularly unreflective approach to patriotism.

Palin represents the last run: one last chance to deny the fact that the USA is not the center of the universe, that the rest of the world matters, that evolution is a basic tenet of nature and that global warming is real. There are so many things I would like to not believe in: cholesterol, aging, saving money. It is painful to think about these things and hard to deal with their reality, so sometimes rather than face them I hide in my various addictions.

The Reagan era gave us an uncontrolled crack epidemic. Then the Reagan era offered us damnation and redemption in the form of mandatory drug testing and rehab. The myth of rehab is that you can cure addiction, get clean. You can’t cure addiction, you can only shift it laterally, sublimate or manage it.

In order to manage addictions—first they must be acknowledged for what they are, but not judged. I grant people their religion and their patriotism and even their guns just so we can move along to the real issues like poverty, education, global warming, crumbling markets, the failure of unilateralism and the decline and fall of the American Empire.

I will always be prone to addictive behavior. I can quit smoking, but then I might shift to painkillers. The form changes but the urge is the same, it is the urge to hide. The myth that we can cure addictions is the most pernicious outcome of the notion that addictions are diseases in the physiological sense. It is no coincidence that the U.S. entered its least reflective, post-psychological phase during the Reagan era. The man declared war on sex and drugs and all of a sudden everyone was an addict of something but addiction was a disease that could be cured if you made your penance and received absolution in the form of rehab and renunciation. Defining everything as a disease was the silver bullet that made so much else possible. With everyone taking the cure, finding the 12 step religion, bowing their sweaty heads in contrition, the last ounce of counterculture rebellion was effectively snuffed out. Drugs became less a poor way of dulling the edge of hard realities faced or of exploring the contours of the mind, than at best alternate booze and at worst performance enhancers. Without drugs, the nation turned its lonely eyes to other more pernicious forms of denial. Flags and fags and god and guns trump facing the consequences of our behavior in the world and taking responsibility for our actions as stewards of it.

You would have thought that after 8 years of W, a binge of blind faith and pure avoidance [it’s no coincidence that Bush is a reformed alcoholic etc. who now denies the world through the cocaine rush of evangelical patriotic zeal], that folks would have been willing to swear off some of this shit and they did, but only for the length of one hungover day at work. As soon as our buddy came along with a whiff of something good—no matter how fucking bad we knew it would be, no matter if we knew it would cost us our job, our wife, our nation’s wealth and standing in the world—all that was readily sacrificed because of a little taste of the good stuff. Forget that this shit is pure shred. Hooking on to Palin is like smoking carpet lint. She is so clearly rock bottom. The desperation is so clear because the reality is almost impossible to stave off any longer—no wonder they had to go outside the lower 48 to find someone out of touch enough to peddle this crap.

In the end and after much thought, I believe I know what killed David Foster Wallace. I have been afraid to analyze a man I never knew and who was so clearly a genius and therefore existed in a different sphere of logic and dreaming from the rest of us, but what the fuck. In the end what killed him was the fact that he could not escape his own culture. A white Christian boy who came of age in the 80s, he ultimately believed in rehab and redemption and that one could be free of dependence and addiction and become purged and pure and saved—or die trying. Wallace had been suffering from hardcore depression since college and had endured the life of his mind with the help of an early powerful anti-depressive drug he’d been taking since the late 80s. In the summer of 08 he tried to get free of that drug. He wanted to cleanse himself and be able to function within the contours of his beautiful mind unsullied by external taint. He killed himself that autumn. Some see his act as noble, trying to get free; to me it’s the same sad and reckless denial of our nature that has landed us here on the precipice of nothing good.

I Will Watch the Watchmen

One of the great joys of The Watchmen is that not only is it about anti-heroic superheroes, but it is anti-heroic and anti-comic in structure. Written after the Star Wars phenomenon began to change most films into comics, The Watchmen helped change comic books into novels. The graphic novel blew up in the 80s with mind-blowing works such as The Dark Knight, Sandman and Sin City, but although each of those titles put forth excellent stand alone efforts most were written as series. The Watchmen could only ever have been a one off and you know that in your bones going in—it offers up a complete world, takes up its history and posits a future. A truly finite work is rare these days, rarer still is one with a great third act—a third act that leaves the world slightly changed.

Besides serializing and syndicating every frame of film that came after it, the Star Wars altered the very structure of the movies that got made in its wake [although, oddly enough, this did not hold true for A New Hope, which had a fairly slow build] . As we know, with the rise of the blockbuster era most movies, in pursuit of greater punch and bigger first weekends, started front loading the crap out of themselves. More and more films were launched with more and bang before the credits—if there even were credits. Exposition was for losers.

It would seem that if you feed people corn long enough, eventually they are going to shit corn, and since the notion of front loading came to prominence everything from film to tv to comics and the novel has been infected by that approach. Even most authors who came of age post Star Wars sucked on the tit of big first scenes and suck at endings. They have the same pressure to grab the reader early and often, and sell books based on perfectly wrought first chapters. The rest, well, fuck third acts—you can’t make a living off great third acts. But you can make immortal works of art with them.

The Watchmen has a very slow, uncanny build. At times you feel like the piece will never lift off and yet you stay with it. Rereading it, the story came back to me—in a slow build. The end fits together brilliantly, but even that has an anti-climactic bittersweet bite to it. Moore has a depressive’s mind, but it is a mind that is inexorably trying to overcome its own darkness.

I will be watching Zack Snyder. Not just to see if the man who put buff men in diapers and made it work can improve on the original’s slightly underwhelming but apt visuals, but to see if he will dare to create an anti-blockbuster blockbuster. I will be watching to see if Snyder will be able to create goofy realistic anti-super superheroes, if he will have the guts to maintain the historical sweep of Cold War America so important to the piece, but mostly I will be watching to see if he will manage to resist the temptation and no doubt he pressure to follow the standard Syd Fields formula that has been handcuffing Hollywood for 30+ years. Batman Returns certainly made it possible for mega-blockbusters to venture into new creative territory. It remains to see if anyone else will follow.


Coraline

Coraline is one film that successfully resists the shackles of Syd. Gradual and abrupt in turns like its sophisticated stop action/computer animation format, Coraline’s story proceeds like a dream and resists those classic event markers that are even more prevalent in animated films than they have become in live action films.

The most resonant image to take away from Coraline occurs once she passes beyond the borders of the Other House’s property—the Other Mother only created what was necessary. When Coraline gets far enough away the animation begins to fail and break down to a white back drop. While this moment is not new, the geniuses at Warner Bros. did this to Daffy Duck decades ago, it does seem very timely as our economy recedes and shrinks back so that only what is necessary remains.

Bag Props for Hendrik Kerstens






















Found this guy when I clicked on a photo of Scarlett Johansson as Girl with a Pearl Earring. He poses his daughter, a younger, chubbier, less groomed version of Johansson in poses from Vermeer and other Flemish masters [or in their spirit]—but with arch and subtle twists.

Some of his other pics: girl against barren sea, little girl in makeup—more expected/less enchanting. Overall, though, surprising, odd and immaculate photos.

http://www.hendrikkerstens.com/index.html

The United States of Tara

Toni Collette in The United States of Tara

Is there anything more potentially embarrassing, off-putting, fatuous and multifariously insulting than the upcoming The United States of Tara on Showtime?

The tag line on the commercials I've heard spoken by Collette herself is:

Having multiple personalities is like hosting a kegger in your brain.

That's the best they could pull from the wreckage? This is what Diablo Cody has wrought of her Academy Award gold?

Why is the show insulting and to whom? People afflicted with dissociative identity disorder probably do not feel like they are hosting keggers--in their minds or otherwise--ever, but I can't precisely speak to that. I have not known anyone afflicted with dissociative identity disorder. I have, however, known schizophrenics with less sit-com compatible forms of the disease and they, to a person, are most assuredly not hosting frat mixers in their brains.

On a broader scale of offensiveness, why is Collete's "normal/original/baseline" persona Tara? Tara is, as described in the show's literature,

...a working mother of two who paints nursery room murals that totally rock and sometimes doesn’t feel like herself.

No, Showtime, you rock--you self-serving cable slum!

Why can't Tara's "real" personalility be the dude? That can't happen of course because no woman would ever really have a male personality? Certainly not on Showtime. Though I have etched in my mind several brilliant and enduring images to the contrary from the recently closed Catherine Opie retrospective at the Guggenheim. Her photo masterpieces of diversely gender identified individuals and families display more genuine humanity than a lifetime of Showtime.

Of course it would be even more beyond the pale for the brain trust behind the show [among them Steven Spielberg] to contemplate Collette's normal personality as being the retro mom, Alice. Alice, again from the literature,

...is the perfect homemaker who believes in good, traditional values and bakes cakes that would make Betty Crocker jealous.

It would have been completely too risque for Alice to have been her "real" personality. At least Hilary Swank made lady dudes sort of cool, but traditional homemakers?

Neither Buddy nor Alice could be real people in Showtime demographic land, they are merely funny and pathetic ciphers compared to the real women meant to watch the show [as Showtime attempts to stuff more and more working mothers of two into its dope dealing, bogus lesbian pie hole]. No doubt, however, we will come to love her inferior, loser personalities in spite of how superior we [and Tara] are to them. Yech.

Futrhermore, as a dude, I get pretty insulted by the way some women actors play men. Milton Berle had more insight into women when he played one [wigless and smoking a cigar] than Collette has into men when she plays Buck who...

...is a fan of beer and motorcycles who’s always up for a good night at he titty bar and isn’t afraid to kick some ass.

Wow! Could this project get any more nuanced?

But hey, lest the men folk become put off, The United States of Tara has shoe-horned in one more personality to appease us. Just for us emotionally stunted dudes out there forced to watch the show with our de rigueur mothers of two, they chucked in a hot teenager personality for Collette! Count me in!

Yech again.

It's a pity that Collette, who broke into film as a talented young actress playing a young woman totally against stereotype in "Muriel's Wedding," has chosen to play to and abuse so many stereotypes in what reeks of eau de talented actress vehicle.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a cake to bake.

No, Martha

Martha Rosler
Great Power
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th St. [btwn 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.744.7400, www.miandn.com

Sept 6 – October 11, 2008

The entrance to Martha Rosler’s show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash was blocked off by a black and chrome turnstile. With no written explanation. I was told that I had to pay a quarter to be able to gain entrance to the show. I was told that it was for charity—Artists Against Whatever. I was also told I wouldn’t be able to get anything else like it for a quarter.

It would be easy to make comments here about not wanting to pay money to see photo-collages, but that is not the point [and Jerry Saltz made it better: http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/50974/] . The point is that being able to go to galleries free is one of the greatest gifts we are given and I don’t want that taken away. While a quarter is indeed cheap, I’m old enough to remember when we were told that paying for tv would be a great idea and that it would only ever be for a tiny fee.

Worse though is that Rosler’s strategy is, writ small, the exact kind of left wing tyranny that turned so many people off to most of the other right headed thinking embraced by progressives. It provided kindling for so much of the reactionary behavior of the past 30 years because it turned so many people so decidedly off.

Consider that my .$25, Martha.


Yes, Richard

Richard Kern

Feature Inc., 276 Bowery [just below Houston], New York, NY 10012, 212.675.7772, http://www.featureinc.com/ October 2 - November 1, 2008

I was on my way up the Bowery to visit the new Feature for the first time. I ran into Deb. I hadn’t seen Deb in a long time. I told her I was on my way to visit the new Feature for the first time. We talked about Richard Kern. She had seen the show and told me he was revisiting his toothpaste cum shots. She told me she had come up with that idea when she posed for him back in the day. She didn’t want to take her clothes off and did that instead. She’s that girl with the braces.

I am not sure why I don’t hate Richard Kern. He has the exact job I would love to have, and yet I don’t resent him for it. It is not hard to understand why. Like Helmut Newton before him and unlike Larry Clarke, Kern seems to be honest, professional and non-exploitative [or as non-exploitative as one can be in these things] about what he does. He’s also really good at it. I don’t know if he is good at finding sexy women or finding women sexy. Either way [or both] there is no denying that the kind of old school pornography that Richard Kern practices oozes a love of women. Kern’s women seem most decidedly in charge of their sexuality. Go to a Richard Kern exhibition and you will leave it looking at the world differently [that’s what art does for you]. You will be surprised to find all the sexy out there. Women you might otherwise have overlooked, Kern finds them and makes you want them and it seems like you can have them because they seem to want you, want sex. These are not women who secretly want to be spanked and hope you catch on; these are women who pull down their pants, slap their asses and tell you to step up and smack it like a man.

But I digress.

Just as Morandi is the painters’ painter, Richard Kern is the pornographers’ pornographer. The internet has served to explode the porn phenomenon and saturate our consciousnesses and our cookies. It has not, however, succeeded in undercutting or diminishing Kern’s work, because, like desire, porn is infinite and like the priapus continually [we hope] reconstituting itself. In this show Kern has borrowed back from the web with upskirts, wet t-shirts and two girls in a tub—all now staple genres. He even includes among some of his framed shots the actual panties worn by, and/or shared by his models [order now].

No matter what pops up in my inbox or google searches, few experiences will ever outstrip the times I spent pouring over books of Kern’s pics at the old St. Marks’ Bookstore back in the day. I stood there among my fellow hipster art book aficionados hungrily poring over each page and with each page, I was laid bare, seduced and dismissed by one dirty ev girl after another. I was left sweaty, exhausted and utterly in love. Stay hard dude.

The ARTHOLE Is Back!

I wrote the entry below last January fully intending to continue my sporadic contributions to this blog. I am well aware of the fact that in the two plus years I’ve posted to this blog I have consistently missed the point of the whole format which is to quickly spew out commentary. Though anally and orally expulsive by nature, I have chosen to interpret this most logorrheaic of forms in a completely tight-assed manner. Like an idiot I chose to edit my work!

Despite how tightly I grip onto my words, I never intended this nearly yearlong gap to ensue. That was another matter. The key to the break, and my almost near complete abandonment of art writing, lies in my ultimate response to the new New Museum as explicated below. I was dispirited.

The cause of that dispiriting is flushed out as specifically as I could manage below. My reaction to the space was so negative that I thought it had to be me and so I held off printing it. However, my one visit to that museum is something I replay over and over in my head, and so I have come to believe it means something.

What I believe my response to the museum means, and why I believe it is worth publishing [and resuming writing] is because I have managed to find a nugget of cultural and artistic relevance in all this. Even if most culture has ceased to resonate for me and even if I have become yet another burnt out art writer, there is something emblematic in the failure of the institutions that were responsible for the creation of the museum and the failure of the institutions whose job it was to receive that creation that makes the phenomenon resonate beyond the reality of it being one more crappy contemporary museum. These institutional failures function as the one truly cultural gesture embedded in the whole painful affair. They echo the litany of disasters our think tanks, government and press have perpetrated on the world at large in the past 8 years with precious little, if any, retribution. SANAA keeps designing. Fukuyama keeps publishing.


Bad Museum



For all the bullshit written about architecture, all the journals and magazines and newspaper articles, for all the conferences and talks and symposiums, for all the fact finding missions and juried contests, for all the seminars and lovely scale models and computer animations, board presentation and board reviews and for all the MONEY spent on all these things all in the name of architecture, why is it that none of these a-wipes know fuck-all or give fuck-all about a simple little thing called flow?

The MOMA re-do is infuriating. In a one billion dollar boondoggle swipe of his tidy hand, Tanaguchi managed to bind Prometheus—and in so doing shackle the greatest collection of modern art in the world. The Rose Center is simply annoying—critics love it because it looks good from the outside, but let’s say you actually want to, uh, go from point “A” to point “B” within the structure. Try it; it’s fucktarded. The new New Museum is something else entirely. The new New Museum is…dispiriting.

It took me a moment to find the word. I am normally fairly glib, but I could not find the word. I could not find the word because it was not a word I usually feel. Especially when I go to museums.

I have been to folk museums in tenements in Lublin and in white washed villages in Bulgaria. I have been to too many Holocaust and Concentration Camp Museums. I have been to children’s museums, craft museums and science museums. I have been to the Tolstoy museum and admired the leather wheels on the bicycle he took up riding when he was 70. I have been to museums tucked away in ancient synagogues, cathedrals and mosques. I did the Hermitage in one day: long story.

My first museum was the Brooklyn. I loved it for its large slowly unraveling charm, the giant totem poles, Aztec temple models and American paintings. I loved it for the treasure hunts it offered: my mom and I would track down a list of items tucked away in paintings and sculptures and amid period rooms. It taught me to look in an active way. We did this while my sister took art classes. I was too young for classes. I was 4.

From then on and within the scores of other museums I subsequently visited and revisited, I have felt every range of emotion. I have wept and mourned in museums. I have fallen in love and been heartbroken in museums. I have become abject, inspired and even redeemed within the walls of the world's museums great and small. Even when museums were bad or pathetic, I could find some perverse humor in them, some poignancy or bittersweet pain. Something. Never in my life have I been dispirited. After descending from the 5th to the 2nd floor galleries in the New Museum, I was at last dispirited.

Why?

In the past decade or so, something has been creeping into the equation of museum going. That something else has involved the complicity of the architect, the museum board and the various institutions that revolved around them. There are and have been many new museums and museum expansions that took place prior to this last decade. But never before were so many of these projects so intrusive and obstrusive. Never before had they promised so much, seemed so aware of their tasks, created so much bullshit and bullshit literature ululating their projects, and yet ultimately delivered so little. Never before had these projects so consistently failed to deliver and on such grand and depressing scales.

In spite of all the missions statements and douche bag verbiage generated around museums, especially contemporary museums, as they blather about community and education and environments, all museums have pretty much the same mission: to exhibit whatever it is they want to exhibit in the best manner possible. It doesn’t matter if your purview is Etruscan Art or middling contemporary art with political/global leanings: you put the shows up, write the wall texts, stock the the gift shop and open the fucker up.

I’ve seen enough contemporary museums to know and resignedly understand that most contemporary architects hate most contemporary art and find it a nuisance even when building spaces for it. Consequently, my expectations were low when I went to the New Museum. However, I was suspicious of my suspicion of star-chitecture. Perhaps I was just jealous? Perhaps I was merely overreacting to what my insecurities perceived as a spate of over-hyped, overfunded public works that failed to function for the actual living, breathing public despite all the lip service that was paid to said public.

Not wanting to let my overarching bitterness color my judgment [yet again], I walked up the Bowery with an open mind.

From a distance the building’s outer skin brought to mind the fences on roof gyms in schools across New York City. As I drew nearer though, it brought to mind less chain link fences than speaker covers, in fact the whole thing could be pass for an oversized overdesigned iPod dock. That’s ok. What's more, the thing sits fairly well on the street, though the big glass opening with the art nerds hanging out in front not smoking seems like an open wound in the street—a gash infected with arties such as myself. Not wanting my self-loathing to overwhelm me, I kept an open mind.

The lobby was fine if too small: open, and all done up in grays and whites and blacks. Someone’s LED boxes crawled with second generation Holzer style platitudes. Very New Museum – they’re entitled. It’s their purview.

I wanted to start at the top and work my way down. The three elevators are an increase on the available elevator space at the far larger and even more appallingly laid out MOMA, and still we waited. The very top was reserved for offices. The 5th floor, the highest floor open to the public, is the site for the obligatory study center. [What, if not study, are we meant to be doing on the other floors?] The center consisted of some photos of the neighborhood the museum was in the process of paving over and a very nice reading room that lead to some very tony looking offices. The exhibit proper started on the 4th floor and featured an assortment of new sculpture mostly based on crap and crap assemblages, again all very New Museum and that’s fine—it’s their purview.

The room itself was very tall and fairly big and all on one side of the elevator banks. Not wanting to wait for the elevators again, never wanting to wait for the elevators again, I ducked into the unmarked stairwell the runs down the off center of the building. A couple below me were stopped half way down the grand height of the next floor because they were unsure whether the stairs opened onto the 3rd floor or only onto the lobby. There was no signage hung on the already cracking cement that comprised the stairs.

With a little encouragement, I got us all to the next floor: another big fluorescent bin with a little more to it because of its stair feature. Starchitects don’t design well formed and functioning spaces; they design features. Think about it: what newish structure doesn’t have a skin- or glass- or water- or stair-feature? This stair-feature is long and thin and runs all the way down to the second floor behind the enclosed and unmarked un-featured actual staircase. Nevermind that halfway down the feature a speaker droned out a voice so nasal and annoying that you automatically wanted to disagree with everything it said. Nevermind that: at least at last some flow! A way to get from one floor to the next without waiting or opening up a door into a blind stairwell! The stair-feature also had a light-feature—extremely self and, no doubt, energy conscious incandescent style fluorescents that stuck out perpendicularly from the wall. Both these lights and the overhead lights in the galleries proper cast such a harsh hue that I pity the paintings that will ever have to hang here [as of my visit the wall collages that were to be part of the crap show were not yet up]. I’m hardly a lighting expert, but even I know that there are warm fluorescent options available. If only there were some neighborhood in New York City where a person could go and explore lighting options…

Done with the third floor I pinned all my hopes on the 2nd floor grand gallery. The 5th through 3rd floors of this BRAND NEW museum were distinctly nothing much. I’d already had enough of the stunted basement at the beginning of my visit. If there were any hope that this museum, after all the time and all the hype, would not be joining the ranks of the other overhyped and flowtarded, money wasting, shitbag museums and museum expansions that have infected this city---if there were any hope it lay in the second floor.

I went around the gallery bin on the 3rd floor to resume the long stair and take it down to the 2nd floor. But no monsieur. I had forgotten. The long thin stair being a stair-feature was unburdened by such pedestrians matters as, well, pedestrians. Where it should have continued, the stair feature merely ended. The space beneath the stair from the 4th to the 3rd was a vast narrow wasted space with a packing crate leaning against one wall—and to make sure that no one attempted to activate the space, it was roped off. Roped off dead space in a urban micro museum?!? Children with blocks make better use of space in buildings they intend to destroy by chucking action-figures at them. Children with blocks have more consideration for the placement of said action figures in their sweet doomed structures then SANAA had for us poor sap, sucker, pant-shitter, momma boy visitards.

So it was back to the blind stairwell, and, at last, clutching what feathers were still left un-plucked of my hope, I burst onto the grand 2nd floor. And at last: another even bigger bin! More fluorescents!! And this time instead of stair feature or a psyche out stair feature on the other side of the elevator bank, there was an long narrow gallery featuring actual art work!!!

And that was it. There was nothing else to be had of it. Millions of dollars and millions of words and all we got, pretty much, was three big rooms improperly connected.

Dispiriting isn’t it?

Does anyone who writes about, designs or selects these things actually visit museums?