The Tears of Things

Real Good For Free [Updated]

[Update 11/23/07: In the last posting I made an error in judgment with a derogatory comment about Amy Young and food. I apologize to her now. I'm sorry; I shouldn't have written that part, and I've taken it out of the posting.

Prompted by a local slam poet, Ms. Young wrote a long comment about us and that posting on her new blog. After Catherine read it, she said, "That really hurt her feelings," and we decided to take out that one sentence. It's just that we thought someone who hangs out with body suspenders and holds her own with roller dykes might have thicker skin.

The apology holds. Other questions remain, though, for a subsequent post, soon.]

Now me, I play for fortune,
And those velvet curtain calls.
I've got a black limousine,
And two gentlemen
Escorting me to the halls.
And I play if you have the money,
Or if you're a friend to me--
But the one man band
By the quick lunch stand--
He was playing real good, for free.
--Joni Mitchell

by Jerome du Bois

For several years now the people running the online version of the Arizona Republic newspaper have been eagerly plunging their heads, over and over, into the commode. These days they try to outdo the Phoenix New Times in the tattooed-jellowrestling derby. In the late 90s I bemoaned the lack of reader contributions to the paper Republic. Now, online, they offer up people I would cross streets of deep mud to avoid, showing off their freshest ink or blowing bad hot air about chowing & telling at their newest favorite bean dip dump. Or posing in their best spandex on First Friday--without warning, which I hereby give the reader now: Yeesh. Fruitcake city was not what I was talking about, people.

Until recently, the online visitor had unrestricted access to all of this rancid bounty. We check in, too, as cultural pathologists, with latex gloves over our eyes, in hopes of glimpsing some change in quality, some clue that the ship of skank had altered it name and direction. But no. And beginning about two months ago, while we tried to activate slideshows about art or fashion, there appeared a banner ad across the top of the slideshow popup, overlaying the buttons and arrows which control the slides. There was no x-box to close the window or ad; there was no way to access the slideshow. The viewer was stuck.

This went on for days, and I became puzzled at the lack of correction. Surely somebody from the downtown Phoenix art scene would have made sure that images of his or her friends were available online? Weeks went by, and then, just a few days ago, whenever we clicked a headline on the Arts Main page, to try to access almost any story, we got sent to this innocuous little survey form which begins:

To help us keep azcentral.com available to all users free of charge, please answer the following questions. You should not be asked these questions again during future visits using the same computer.

Also, if you go to comment on a story you find access to, another questionnaire, even more intrusive, stands in your way. (Catherine says, "I almost succumbed to the urge to respond to the fashion blog editor's pathetic cry for Fashion Week wardrobe suggestions. But why should I give up my home address and birthdate just to tell her to go with her hot pink clown shorts?") Of course we refuse to participate. Catherine speculates that might be why the banner ad continues to appear over the slideshows. Aha.

Well, now. We have a few things to say about this new state of affairs, as well as a few observations about a new art blog on azcentral.com --run by the formaldehydal Amy Young-- which so far has no little survey gate blocking its entrance, and no bottom once you're in there. Bring your ten-foot Q-tips.

Let's remember when this innocuous-seeming survey form popped up: right after the big hoohah between Andrew Thomas and the New Times fatcats, which pivoted on privacy rights and internet information. So in the light of this legal wrangling, as the "masters" --that's what they call them down at the newspaper-- desperately try to collect as much demographic info as they can to keep and woo their dwindling advertisers with new hard data, do they really think they're going to get even their minimal 10 percent response?

And when they write

To help us keep azcentral.com available to all users free of charge

they fly in the face of the NYTimes's failure of their Time$elect Option, which crashed and burned. If they put up moneywalls, readers will just read what they need to elsewhere and somehow find life beyond Montini, and the people who do pony up money will end up feeling like suckers later. Do the "masters" really think that people care to "help keep" the moneybags people bagging their money? This is managerial wisdom these days. They get big bucks. We're not impressed.

Maybe we would be impressed if the quality of the online work exploited the medium, and if there were any writers who really cared, who could really write, and who could bring passion to their writing. But everybody down there is tired, burned-out, vapidly predictable, or queasily perverse. They expect people to pay for pap? They could have huge popup photos and very long essays and articles, if they wanted to; it's not as if they're going to run out of electrons. But you have to have the chops, and nobody down there does. It seems to me that the more generous and open the venues have become, the more shrunken and stingy the writers have become. Again, big surprise, because they've made themselves numb and dumb, as Catherine says. They have nothing to say because there's not much inside them, as we'll see below with Amy Young. Regardless, whatever copy finally makes the screen, you have to give it away to readers and make your money from advertisers. Finally, stay out of people's lives.

When you come here to The Tears Of Things, you can read whatever you want whenever you want, pop up any of the photos of our amazing artworks and projects --big, big pictures-- and watch the banner change at irregular but frequent intervals. You never know what you're going to see when you land here. (When was the last time that has happened at any of the other art blogs?) And most of our written pieces are more detailed, reflective, and involved than most blogs, not to mention newspapers. For example, I mention again our so far unpublished "Heard And Soul" piece, which Catherine did most of the work on, including over a hundred captioned photographs. We went back to the museum three more times just to make sure we got everything right, and to enjoy the peace in a cone free of irony. And then there was our "Pride of Phoenix" series, which had about twenty parts, again with many pointed and relevant photos. Hell, you can't get more than 250 words and a couple of tiny photos out of Kerry Lengel or Richard Nilsen or anybody else about any exhibition in the Valley.

We're less bloggy than most blogs; we don't need to add our opinion on Campaign 2008 to the millions already out there. Instead, we take the time to polish our work so that we can say something good and helpful and new. Some people call us negative. I want to examine those people's credentials: what do they stand for? What image of humanity do they defend and promote? (Clue One: The Phoenix Art Museum --probably through reccomendations by the Contemporary Forum people, though I'm guessing here-- has purchased the vile, misogynistic, antihuman rape sculpture called "The Embrace" by Patricia Piccinini. Google it yourselves. And they've got a Damien Hirst butterfly piece. People ought to reflect on how these things come about: concentrations camps for butterflies and moths, raised only to die, never to fly, supervised by a man who has been killing creatures for his pleasure most of his life.)

The only IP addresses we ban are spam carriers or our truly abusive and always anonymous cowardly enemies. ("The Hellion"? Really, little pissant: grow up.) We don't ask your gender or age or where you hail from or how fat your bankroll might be; we do ask, if you comment, that you use your real name. It is our only condition. It continually mystifies us why someone would not want to stand proudly behind their words; but we're used to being mystified.

The Tears Of Things. It's all real good, and for free.

Now, about Amy Young. Let's start at the top: she calls the blog Art Attacks! Already we've got brush-with-death imagery, a goosed-up, aggressive, violent persona she's projecting --and of course it's limp baloney when you get to the actual entries. But why put such a name on an art blog? For the pun's sake? It's not just lame and irrelevant, it's ugly.

Oh . . . Okay. Ugly's the point. I keep forgetting that.

Under the title, as her "epigraph," I suppose, she's got

Eye-goodies, Issues, Happenings and Meanderings

All empty words, except perhaps the first. Amy Young thinks art is some kind of consumable, something you eat.

Her first entry, on November 13, was about the Deck show --skateboards. Here it is:

I hate to start off this blog with an "if you missed it, you missed out" type of post, but it is my blog, after all, so I feel that I have to. Recently, the doors closed on the Molten Brothers second annual DECK show--featuring 200 customized skate decks from local and national artists. What a wonderful display of work. We're talking paintings, sculptures, and even a deck by local photographer Dayvid LeMmon that was turned into a surveillance deck, complete with security cameras. No materials were left out . . . glass, brass, it was quite spectacular. For those who missed it, here are a couple of highlights.

And there were two photos which "enlarged" to the size of half a playing card.

First, she's in the gallery business with one of the "Molten Brothers" --busy Mike Goodwin. Seems hinky to me. The show got plenty of publicity without her, it closed before her posting, and yet here she is flogging it.

Second, this was her first posting. Reread her first sentence. Presumably she had plenty of lead time to compose her first posting on the only newspaper art blog in town. Instead of reading about what she wanted to do with the blog, her aesthetic guidelines, or starting out with a serious question, we get this leftover stale meatloaf.

Third, celebrating skateboards only betrays the dead end of modern youth culture and its aging wannabes (like Mike Goodwin), who dress like big babies in t-shirts and baggy shorts, who wear dreadlocks, and use scary terms like "thrashing" and "shredding" to hide what's really going on: skateboarders are just wannabe surfers, but there's no comparison; a real wave would shred them indeed.

In her second posting, on the same day, Ms. Young --she still calls herself "missamyyoung"-- linked to several artists. Again, one can't help but wonder about conflict of interest here, since she helps operate at least two local galleries.

She shows her true perverse colors in the third posting, which is about a guy who makes ceramics from human cremains:

Anyhoo, Krafft, now residing in Seattle, has spent the last 15 years doing gloriously unusual things with ceramics. The inventor of SPONE - human bone china - or more precisely porcelain made with “cremains” takes the funerary arts to a whole new level. A commemorative spone® plate of your dearly departed--what could be better?

Those beautiful china patterns horded in granny's attic take on a whole new look as a full-size rifle or perhaps, and those permeating colors serve well as the Mad Cow Creamer--displayed in the pic.

She loves this stuff. She would probably see nothing wrong with drinking from a human skull. Maybe she already has. This entry fits with her well-known reputation as a murder pimp. And the Arizona Republic recruited her. This is the kind of person they want to present to their reading public. Sad to say it says a lot.

The next two entries reveal the basic emptiness of her mind. Already, two days into her blog, she's out of ideas and soliciting responses to a completely inane "Question of the Day." I quote it in full to show just how badly she expresses herself:

When you're looking to show your work in a gallery, how important is it to you that the gallery owner is art-savvy, and can discuss your work and style to others? Or, are you just looking, as they say, for any port in the storm? I was talking to an out-of-state artist who mentioned that he had been approached by someone that he knew that never promoted art events but promoted other types of events and said "hey, i'm now booking artists," and wanted to see if the artist was interested. That particular artist was not interested, feeling like he'd rather work with someone who had at least some working knowledge of contemporary art, in some capacity, other than just finding some of it appealing.

The next, most recent entry, November 14th, is a forlorn nudge:

Don't be shy, I'm hoping that at least, with the questions of the day, we can get some dialogue happening.

A couple of idiots responded as you would expect, but otherwise, no dialogue. And no more entries for five days.

Real bad, but so far, it's free.

And now, if you'll excuse us, we have to go get our CenFaux inoculations.

Posted by Jerome at November 19, 2007 05:30 PM | TrackBack