Lydia’s Blog

So I’m in Graz at the moment. Nothing to do with the opera this time. I was invited by a friend of mine, a well-known and oft-published American visual artist, to facilitate a performance piece he’s been invited to present as part of the renowned Steirischer Herbst festival.

The professional, high-brow art scene is, sadly, totally impenetrable to me. I mean, throw a book about Peggy Guggenheim or Clement Greenberg at me and I can get through it. Joyfully, even. I’ve seen the work of Charles Saatchi’s stable both in Brooklyn and in London, and wound up powerfully effected by what I saw. Put me on a sleek white leather couch beside and across from curators, practitioners and admirers of arty art art art, however, and my guts start to automatically churn from the level of navel-gazing and frothy heights of self-righteous observatory hyperbole batted about within the improbably well-dressed group.

It always impresses me that the steadfast assertion of originality always ends up yielding certain stereotypes. In this crowd, are a few constant presences, no doubt duplicated in other similar manifestations in most other art clusters. The dour but wiltingly encyclopedic woman in her forties, dressed entirely in black or gray (ditto the hair)…which would create the disorienting impression (with the assistance of skin which actually may never have seen sun) of a living black and white photo—were it not for the shock of perfectly applied china red lipstick. There’s also the slim and tailored, perfectly coiffed and unmistakably homosexual power-player, capable of conducting six different meetings with ten different people, literally at the same time. One mustn’t forget the architecturally frozen hair and EU 800 glasses frames. There’s also mildly Latin-looking sporty guy who never smiles, snide, overweight British guy who gesticulates like a tarmac controller and talks to my tits as if they could possibly regurgitate theories on the “modernity of access”, and tall, pale stick-like female intern who nods a lot.

To me, this entire thing seems like the “extreme sports” of mental stamina. Today, I heard a panel discussion in which no respondent could produce more than eleven words in a minute. There was a lot of throat clearing, self-conscious pushing of tastefully greasy hair away from furrowed brows and searching gazes into some unidentified distance…but nothing that would keep me from shoving shards of broken glass into my rectum, were there some available.

I am jonesing so hard right now for America’s funniest home videos, hair metal videos, a clear mental picture of an orangutan jerking off to circus music…or basically anything that doesn’t mention Deleuze at least once every other eleven word minute.

They say that the general public is a dirty animal.

Thank Jesus.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.