Category: better read

Looking for something with which to stay busy or distracted, I decided to record a reading of the brochure for Scott Burton’s 1989 Artist’s Choice exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, in which Burton rather boldly reconsidered the bases and pedestals of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures.

The kicker for anyone who got to the end of the mp3 was to be the last paragraph on the back of the brochure, where it explained that Burton installed some of Brancusi’s Birds on pedestal tables of his own design, and also created seating and brochure holders for the exhibition.

Well, between the untraceable static that appeared in the tracks with the computer-generated voice, my attempts to re-record the tainted sections by reading them myself in a breathy ASMR-style voice, and the jarring editing process in an app I really don’t like, and finally the way these two voices only serve to compound anxiety rather than alleviate it, I’m shelving the whole thing.

Read Burton’s brochure yourself. You shouldn’t need me to tell you It’s been on MoMA’s website since like 2017. Anyway, what I’d rather hear is Anne Umland’s take on this exhibit, which she organized while an assistant to Kirk Varnedoe.

Artist’s Choice | Burton on Brâncuși, Apr 7 – July 4, 1989 [moma]

Eight years ago, I was inspired by Ian Bogost’s article on the McRib to create a video work, untitled (where we all go), about art, love, and the inevitability of death. Bogost’s theory that the rare, seasonal appearance of the obviously artificial McRib sandwich helped to normalize the equally artificial McNuggets we see every day. This dynamic, I thought, also describes how the occasional spectacle of blockbuster art auctions create an economic logic for the rest of the art market all the way down the pricing pyramid.

This same scheme is now in full effect in the NFT space. Pyramids merged yesterday when McDonald’s launched a one-week Twitter sweepstakes to promote the return of McRib by giving away ten “McRib NFTs.” At the time of posting, it has received over 81,000 retweet entries.

This edition of Better Read features an abridged version of McDonald’s McRib Social Sweepstakes Official Rules [updated to archive.org link] and of the Terms and Conditions for McRib NFT on Rarible.com, where interested bidders have already offered 0.011 WETH, more than twice the initial market value suggested by McDonald’s.

Because I am never under any illusion that anyone listens all the way through these things, I will not be spoiling anything by telling you how this ends, which is that McDonald’s, Rarible, and any and all of their crew, “will have no liability whatsoever for, and shall be held harmless against, any liability for any injuries, losses or damages of any kind, including death, to persons, or property resulting in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, from acceptance of the NFT.”

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If I knew what to make of this, I probably wouldn’t be selling FOOL-shaped mirrors and aluminum devotional jpgs for cowry shells.

Download Better Read #035– Cryptopunks Evening Sale, 13.2mb, mp3, 13:45 [greg.org]
Lot 11A Larva Labs, 9 Cryptopunks: 2, 532, 58, 30, 635, 602, 768, 603 and 757 [christies.com]

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In 1988 Mike Kelley created Pay For Your Pleasure as one of three works for his show at the Renaissance Society in Chicago.

It consisted of a hallway hung with 43 banners by a signpainter, depicting portraits of great men of arts and letters, plus a quote from each about the transgressive nature of creative genius. There was also one self-portrait by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who’d taken up painting in prison, and whose work was, controversially, garnering market and media attention. Sort of the George W. Bush of his day, except Gacy actually went to jail.

David Rimanelli posted this work on his Instagram recently, and it prompted me to revisit Kelley’s installation, and the quotes he assembled. The Renaissance Society’s documentation includes a text that rightly criticizes those in the spectacle-driven culture who turned a murderer into a celebrity artist. [The work mitigated its own centering of a Gacy painting by including donation boxes for victims’ rights organizations, though, if you think about it, that gesture only offloads the scale-balancing to the viewer.] but it seems oddly silent on what I think was Kelley’s most devastating critique, the consistency with which icons of white male-driven culture seek to excuse themselves from moral obligations to anyone but themselves.

The work was acquired by MoCA in Los Angeles in 1989, and hand to heart, the description is, “Oil on Tyvek, wood, an artwork made by a violent criminal in (location of exhibition), and two donation boxes.” Christopher Knight captured the damning site-specificity and guilt-assuaging in 1992. I would pay a hundred dollars to see this work in Dallas or DC with a W painting.

Mike Kelley: Three Projects, 1988 [renaissancesociety.org]
Mike Kelley, Pay For Your Pleasure (1988) [moca.org]

For the handout at “Ten Approaches to the Decorative,” a 1976 group show at Alessandra Gallery curated by fellow artist Jane Kaufman, Joyce Kozloff contributed two texts: “Negating the Negative (An Answer to Ad Reinhardt’s ‘On Negation’)” and “On Affirmation,” which was also an answer to Ad Reinhardt’s “On Negation.” Recently David Rimanelli posted an image of the handout on instagram. Kozloff first heard Reinhardt read the text at Columbia, when she was in graduate school. It was only published in 1975, in Reinhardt’s collected writings, edited by Barbara Rose. Kozloff’s text is available on the artist’s website.

“Ten Approaches to the Decorative” was a foundational show in what would become known at the Pattern & Decoration movement. Artforum had a lengthy review which mentioned Frank Stella a disconcerting number of times.

Download Better-Read-032-Kozloff-Reinhardt-20210125.mp3 [9:29, 4.7mb]