A short story by Dan Rosa.
These are dark times for the contemporary art world. Works of art fetching millions before the financial crisis now lay unsold and unappreciated. Gone are the days in which you, an emo art student, can randomly weld a couple pieces of steel together or knit something ironic like summer gloves, slap it with a title nobody understands, and call it a day. For an artist, the only way to make money is to throw an animal in a very specific fluid and be named Damien Hirst.
Contemporary art museums are struggling as well. “We might have to shutter our gates and sell our most precious work, ‘Retrospective on a Naked Man Dancing,” said one director of his museum’s beloved modern art video of a naked man dancing. The video isn’t pornography because the man graduated from art school. “I just hope it can find a good home, along with our other favorites, ‘Paper Clips Clipped Together’, and ‘A Styrofoam Muffin.’”
One new museum, however, is making waves in the tight-knit community for its radical new understanding of space. The art community, you see, gets completely and easily obsessed with the new, because all it takes in the art world for something to become popular is for one guy to say “wow, that’s cool” to another guy, who then pretends he understands the meaning even more to one up the first guy by gushing about it to a third guy. In this instance, the first guy was artist Zed Williamson, known best for his 1993 show “Pencils and Pencil Sharpeners and Other Things That Go Together” in San Francisco. One morning when he was driving drunkenly from Nashville to Washington, he stumbled upon the museum and called his friend. “This exhibit may usher in a new era, a new way of being among artists across the world, except in New Zealand,” said Zed, a bigoted Australian. “I hate New Zealand.”
So the museum, in rural Virginia, is attracting a following. The adoring crowds are not just restricted to the East coast cultural elites, but also among the small town, conservative folk. “I hate this piece of crap,” muttered red-neck Tommy Smelt while clinging to his gun and Blame It on the Jews necklace. “It don’t make no sense, and it ain’t creatin’ no jobs.” Okay, so maybe I was wrong about that last part.
Anyhow, all this is the backdrop for noted modern art critic Eliezer Krauss’ trip to the museum to see what all the fuss is about. Krauss has never actually created a piece of artwork, but he has reached the highest rung of critichood for his ability to write pretentiously, even when faced with utterly unpretentious subjects.
Krauss thought about leaving his Manhattan apartment at nine, but decided that time was too cliché, so he instead watched a documentary, scribbled down the address, and left at half-past noon. In the car, he listened to Elton John and a traditional Klezmer band. Secretly, Krauss was neither gay nor Jewish, but it helped his career to pretend he was. For the same reasons, Krauss saw the movie ‘Milk’ and faked losing money to Bernie Madoff.
Nine hours and a couple of traffic jams later, Krauss arrived at the location. Unfortunately for Krauss, he had written down the wrong address, and therefore pulled up to an empty warehouse a half mile before the museum.
“Magnificent,” he said, remembering Zed Williamson’s wonderful review. “The broken windows evoke a strong sense of the past, what used to be, while the overgrown weeds remind us that in the end, nature will triumph.” The front doors were nowhere to be found, so Krauss walked into the abandoned building. Scattered across the grubby floor were needles—hundreds of them. “Beautiful,” he breathed. “I would love to meet this nameless artist.”
After a few hours, Krauss left. He wrote the most magnificently pretentious review the world had ever seen. Within a month, the old warehouse was the toast of New York, patrons were flocking to see the exhibit dubbed ‘Needle Massacre’, and a philanthropic organization was formed to save and protect this most precious, unique work of art.
The new art museum down the street closed for lack of visitors.
Posts
