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New York, 6:33 PM
Mon Dec 7
48 posts in the last 24 hours
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And Hamilton, I envy you for only ever having been ripped off by one editor.
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(Dudes, there are like 4 clips of this epic. I didn't know which was funnier.)
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Like gawker's mission is to post nice sweet puff pieces about people. BWAA HAAA!
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I will make a gross generalization and say that I was probably the only person at the gallery, not counting the staff, who had any professional connection to the art world. In fact, I AM counting the gallery staff. Nothing personal and I’m sure they’re all sweeties, but Half Gallery is an art gallery the way the way James Frey is a novelist or Olivier Zahm is an artist or the hideously decorated lounge down the street where the bill for a jalapeño martini came to $35 is a bar. Short version—they’re not. (The longer version has to do with pornographic simulacra, and it’s just too early in the morning, kids.)
But surely there is something to the pictures as pictures? Let’s see. Naked female bodies on glossy antique furniture in underlit or unlit but luxurious spaces, the bodies splayed, prone, leaping, the faces either obscured or out of the shot altogether, one girl, shot from the waist-down, squatting to pee into what looked like a highball glass. Zahm may take a photograph with his whole self, but he denies his subjects theirs.
This type of thing was last shocking…actually, to a certain class of people, this was never shocking. Think Warhol, think the Surrealists, think Zola, think Beardsley, think Courbet’s "Origin of the World," hell, think The Venus of Urbino, or Bronzino’s less well-known but fascinating nude portrait of Cosimo I de’Medici, an upright musical instrument in Cosimo’s hand taking the place of an erect penis.
These are ostensibly pictures of sex, but they are also pictures of class—the bohemian ultra-rich (and their hangers-on) for whom limits are there to be transgressed. None of the young ladies I saw in Zahm’s pictures are recognizable—so their collusion with his art costs them nothing. It’s a rumor, an intrigue, a liaison sans danger. Tee-hee-hee, I peed in Daddy’s highball glass—hush! Nanny mustn’t know! Note Zahm’s refusal to share his porno sites with Somaiya—for someone who claims that sex is life, he’s eager to brandish a closed door in another man’s face.
To put it bluntly, Stipe had the right idea. These are pictures that those who want to be seen are desperate to be seen not looking at. Blasé is the new dandyism.
By the way--hi James! Hope your shiny little toy make-believe gallery churns along and gives you some hot downtown cred! Personally I think this as likely as the reemergence of the whalebone bustle. But whatever floats your flab.
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Me being the Rolls Royce outside.