Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Art in the Age of Mechanical Memetics.


courtesy of  https://i.redd.it/hdem8nevcqe41.jpg

after I reposted this link on my Facebook wall, I decided it needed a comment. So I keyed out the following:  "it doesn't become art until you break it and it becomes useless." Nanosecond later I thought no one will believe me so let's create a persona, one that will ensure that people will give the sentence a chance to mean something. So I wrote again:  "it doesn't become art until you break it and it becomes useless." -- marcel duchamp. I went out to the musical instrument shop to test some instruments and came back to find that 11 people liked this comment. I was amazed. Yet one person piped up and asked "what is useless?" -- ah! a brave soul, one not easily tricked. But now, I will have to account for my own statement...

Sometimes it feels as if mostly anything I say or do is useless, unless I say that somebody who has PhD or is canonized as an "artist" said it first. Many years playing the game of social media it has worked in my favor to use the fake quotations strategy. Important however is that it is believable, plausible and says something of value. As far as I know, however, Duchamp never said that. I took a ideas from two significant gestures associated with his name: the framing of the urinal outside the utility of diverting the piss. And the statement that the Large Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bride_Stripped_Bare_by_Her_Bachelors,_Even  was rendered "complete" by it being broken accidentally in transport. I thanked my friend Carlo Storrup for his pluck in asking a question that is very difficult to answer, indeed. Over the last 20 years I have cycled through what I think are all the conceivable positions being an artist in relation to the money economy. that I am disappointed is quickly becoming rather irrelevant apropos what is happening with the climate crisis.

Towards this end, I find the following podcast very illuminating. Transforming the life of the artist has never felt more necessary than in the present moment when the homo sapiens is about to asphyxiate itself.

With that said: here is a new short ep of acoustic classical guitar pieces. Pay what you will.
this is the album art before it got squared by capitalism. 
 my soundcloud is being updated with new works every day. here's the latest as of yesterday.

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