Blech. Mehmehmeh I love women. Yeah good for you. So become an amateur pornographer if pro porn is so evil and capitalistic, but stop trying to dress up what gets you hot as something high brow/arty/etc. You're not photographing with your whole self. You're photographing with your cock (how does he press the shutter?) and talking in circles until people buy that there's something more to it.
I attended the opening myself, feeling decidedly shabby in the face of so much careless display of herringbone tweed and quilted jackets: the gallery was packed to F Train levels. People outside coughed discreetly behind clouds of clove-scented smog and made small-to-microscopic talk. Ten minutes after entering, I noticed a tall comely-looking chap wearing a hat made out of a mastodon’s navel who was the only person in the gallery other than myself who was actually looking at the pictures (or those fragments that could be glimpsed behind the guests). Mr. Somaiya, I presume, as everyone else was discussing silk mixes and finger-fucking.
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.
@BookishLookish: Agreed. And this is why I hate Williamsburg... I moved out here--naiively--thinking that I would learn something. But it's about people who inject money like heroine, and smother my eager heart in ash with their snide and willful ignorance. There's no sophistication out here. There are people too cool to be sophisticated. It's a 24-7 game of poker, and if anyone knows what hand you're holding, you're out.
@pureblarney: Get the fuck out of W'burg if you want to make art. Move to Sunnyside, or Jersey City, or Mott Haven and get out with the people. W'burg will suck the very goodness from your marrow, honey.
@BookishLookish: Lol! I'm not an artist. Please don't think that of me. (I'm an elementary school teacher.) And--thank god--to be fair, I don't live in the hole of the 'Burg proper, but rather, on its less harrowing outer edges, away from the hypocrisy and the herpes and the coke-bearing Gavins, who make me dream of pinning their eyelids open and forcing them to watch Love Actually and Lord of the Rings and Yellow Submarine until the TOTAL HELL OMGz of popular culture sends them crying back to Indiana and South Dakota, or wherever their kind are begat.
@BookishLookish: I see no reason why good art could not be made in Williamsburg or by rich people. It's exactly the "with the people" bullshit that has led to spending insane amounts of money to look like you never wash your hair being equated with authenticity.
@RollsRoyceRevenge: I have nothing against rich people, Roy, and some of them are very, very good artists. Getting the hell away from hipsters making bad art was my suggestion.
@Airvault: This should be a lesson to unattractive 8th grade boys the world over. You want to work it with the ladies? Get thee to a photography class.
It's the alternate-universe Keith Gessen & Emily Gould, where he wrote "All Ze Sad Young How You Say? Literary Men," and she scribbled random cantos from Dante on public buildings. #fameballs
@RollsRoyceRevenge: You really do have a thing for Emily Gould, don't you Triple R? Once I realized that, I started looking forward to all your comments, because I adore people fixated on personages that matter little to the rest of the world. We should try to tag-team for a day: You work in an Emily Gould reference in every comment, I accomplish the same with Arthur Cravan. #fameballs
Especially for a Parisian he has an amazing career - for those of us who know the late 80s art scene, Zahm's reviews on the new directions underway - which demanded thinking - were intelligent, and he could walk the walk and talk the talk. Just read them and see, the usual places and art journals through the early 90s. But it seems he went for his inner-SergeG., took his motorcycle, love of being pictured, and eye for beautiful models, and made a living out of it - which ironically fits perfectly with a segment of the least-intelligent part of the art world today. Purple is dross, a Euro-fashion excuse for art junkie-slackers to think they are connected in some larger zeitgeist. Zahm though, like SergeG. is now hoping to brand himself above of that, so it seems. Let's see.
I'm sitting here with my chin gently rested on folded fingers, like Rodin's Thinker, pondering what François Truffaut has to do with any of this. #fameballs
What exactly is your beef with Olivier Zahm? That he runs a magazine and wears sunglasses inside? Purple is awesome--about as cutting-edge as something printed out on dead trees can be. If anything, the world needs more Purples, not fewer. #fameballs
@flossy: I'd say blame the olde American puritanism bug, except Google leads us to believe that Ravi Somayia is a gent of the British persuasion. #fameballs
Clearly, this man is a fop and a dandy, all of which I can forgive. (I got my Ph.D in foppery and dandiness.) What I cannot bear is a charlatan, and this man, claiming to be French, is obviously a charlatan--where in God's name is his beret? His clove cigarette?
We need a Marshall Plan II, to send to suffering mademoiselles our bountiful surplus with nary an expectation of personal gain.
Not grain or loans, of course. I'm referring to their pubic hair shortage. #media
Why do we have so many of these walking clichés in NYC?
For their own good, we should start resettling them in places without access to art house cinema and cable television. #media
12/02/09
12/02/09
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.
12/02/09
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Me being the Rolls Royce outside.
12/02/09
My hero.
Thank you, Gawker. This man is the Brassai of punani.
12/02/09
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I'm just sayin'.
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11/05/09
I rest my case. #media
11/05/09
Not grain or loans, of course. I'm referring to their pubic hair shortage. #media
11/05/09
11/05/09
11/05/09
Dude, you're old enough to be my chartered accountant. Who is also sort of what you look like. #media
11/05/09
For their own good, we should start resettling them in places without access to art house cinema and cable television. #media
11/05/09
11/05/09