It's the Arting Life for Me

I've just gotten done with the NYer Art & Architecture issue, which took me the longer-than-recommended week and a half to get done with. As a dedicated old-things aficionado, I was pretty jazzed by the Smiley rare-map stealer article, not least because it did sort of lay bare the stodgy New England old-boy atmosphere of the business I've sometimes contemplated going into. I'm also fascinated by the pantheon-level modern architects, one of whom (Jorn Utzon) is shown rethinking his most famous building (the Sydney Opera House). There's something mysterious and shamanistic about him and Rem Koolhaas and Gehry and all of the other guys who have the ability to pull forms from their unconscious and make modern temples and monuments. Their genius lies not in their ability to plan or draw; it's more like they have the ability to bring forth ways of seeing the condition of our world and our relationship to nature. A great building is a sort of non-deterministic thesis - it's the apex of modern conceptual art, where great formal imagination invites full participation on the part of the viewer.

On the other hand, we've got the visual art world, where your jaw continues to drop lower and lower as the solipsism and jackassery continues to reach for new lows. Our unidsputed heavyweight champion for this kind of thing is Leo Koenig, a wonderfully punchable 20-something dealer who once got in a fight with a DJ at a friends' opening - and now has a friend memorializing the fight in paint. The painting will be loosely based on Poussin's "The Rape of the Sabine Women". I mean...okay, there's a part of me that wants heroic neoclassical paintings made of things I did when I was drunk. But purely for purposes of self-parody, dear reader, and certainly not something I would expect anyone to shell out 20 grand for. Ecch. Anyhow, Koenig has this posse of young artists who split the difference between the more agressively heterosexual Beats and the guys on Entourage. They strike me as a terrible bunch of trust-fund shitbags who create art out of a half-bored desire to create something that's new in form but hardly new in its effect: a slight shock, then a shrug.

Other notes: Louis Menand should probably have a write-off with Malcolm Gladwell for the alpha-guy-who-makes-boring-things-interesting spot (suggested topics: marshmallow-chicken factories; toenail doctors; the Hawley-Smoot tariff); if I am ever stuck in Dubai, remind me to kill myself, but go skiing indoors first; brief summary of the timely-circa-2002 article on the rise of the graphic novel: "Hey fellas! They've got these books now with words AND pictures! And Harvey Pekar has NO super-powers WHATSOEVER! Heavens to Betsy! Let's tell the world!!!!".

Wheee. Oh, New Yorker. I kid because I love. And also (let's face it) because I feel like a self-conscious preppy dickhead when I'm reading you on SEPTA, considering that I'm always sitting next to someone reading a book with a title like "Pimpin': A Love Story". Maybe I'll fold you up inside the Metro tomorrow...