Nudging Your Way to Oblivion

What to do about those unanswered e mails? Listening to speakers like Deepak Chopra or TED talks and believing in the beneficence and generosity of the universe, you decide one bright spring morning to come out of your cocoon and reveal your desires. You’re going to go after it. You think about all the people who you have been afraid to engage, those who have something you want or who you think would want something you have and make a list. You then start to send missives. If you’re a writer, you may decide that this right time to send that poem or short story to The New Yorker, Tin House or The Paris Review. If you’re a painter you start thinking about Larry Gagosian or Mary Boone. If your a gadget maker you remember the George Foreman ad for InventHelp. The roulette wheel is spinning. Maybe it will be your lucky day. Before the advent of the internet, the manila envelope with its SASE was the proxy for your hopes. Now everything is faster. You hit a button and your attachment is released into posterity. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was the name of a famous war film. It takes less than a second to release your precious cargo, but days, weeks, months pass without so much as a response. You may even have had a distant connection to the editor or art dealer who is a college buddy of your internist. The least you expect is a cordial rejection. It doesn’t take much to thank you and wish you luck in placing your work elsewhere. Yet nothing arrives. Talk about justifiable anger. You try to think up the exact right follow up. If you act like the editor doesn’t remember your original e mail and your shared acquaintance, you're being insulting, Yet there’s a distinct possibility he or she doesn’t know you from Adam. And what to say? Of course you realize that the person you're writing to is beleaguered by petitioners. You understand their predicament and don’t want to rush them. Just get back to me within my lifetime is the kind of thing you want to say, but you realize that you may be regarded like Uriah Heep, with your unctuousness only covering up your obvious rage at being dismissed or forgotten. You decide to be as matter-of-fact as possible. You send an e mail which just asks about the status of the short story, poem, art work or invention. You wait one, two, three days, one, two, three weeks and still no response. Maybe now it’s time to copy and sent the same e mail as if it weren’t sent before. You think of a cluster bomb in which you will mail the same e mail every day for a month. But then you realize you will be regarded as a total nut case, a stalker who may be feared but whose work will not be taken seriously. You will have blown your opportunity entirely. There are only two things left to do 1) pray 2) look on the whole experience as an opportunity for spiritual growth. Rather than feeling despondent at having all your hopes dashed, begin to look at it as a privilege which will open up new worlds of ego-deflation.

The Disgusting Sublime

There are artists who everyone loves to hate. They seem to get an undeserved bang for their buck, garnering maximum attention for little effort which is usually performed by fleets of assistants who execute the works in question. Julian Schnabel was the nominee for most hated of the commercially successful fine artists back in the 80’s but he became a filmmaker whose successes though not as great are also reviled by those who feel that both his commercial and artistic renown is unmerited. In today’s art world Damien Hirst is the most vilified amongst the cognoscenti who sneer at the huge sums commanded, for instance, by his recent spot paintings. Who are the conspicuous consumers who pay top dollar for his work at Larry Gagosian’s international network of galleries which do for the marketing of paintings what Brown Harris Stevens was able to do when they commanded 88 million dollars for the sale of Sandy Weill’s penthouse at 15 Central Park West to Ekaternina Rybolovlev the daughter of the Russian potash billionaire? Surely Brown Harris is one provider of the excessively priced apartments on which high priced art can be shown. But wait a minute? Are we being too hasty? In a review of Hirst’s current show at the Tate, in the April 20^th edition of the TLS, running under the title “The Disgusting Sublime,” Gerard Woodward brilliantly takes up Hirst’s defense. ("The Physical Impossibility of the Idea of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” was the title of Hirst’s famed l991 shark sculpture. And come to think of it, isn’t that title alone worth millions?) “In an essay in the catalogue accompanying this exhibition, Brian Dillon directs us towards Kant’s Critique of Judgement to help us deal with a particular property of the work of Damien Hirst, namely disgust,” Woodward begins. And later talking about Hirst’s sometimes horrifying palette (“corpses of thousands of flies preserved in resin,” for example) he remarks, “the ideational notion of disgust is useful as a way of thinking about the critical recepton of Hirst’s work in recent years, for it is often obscured or even contaminated by associations with a cynical art plutocracy and its excessive interest in wealth, and a perception of Hirst himself as someone tainted with such unsavoury qualities as arrogance, laddishness, exploitativeness and cruelty.” Another million dollar idea, which will undoubtedly fatten both Hirst and Larry Gogosian’s pockets, but which also makes us think. Whoever said art or life were fair?