notes on an art scene
i.
Could the man in the piss-stained jeans asking for a free drink be Zeus? “You’ve learned my secret”, Byron says. Then I promptly forgot his secret, and most of his insight on simulacra and the names of the filmmakers Wim Wenders pissed off, and the state of the midwest in the seventies, etc. The secret was that he isn’t Zeus but that the divine is hiding in the pedestrian maybe, or that the best conversationalists are usually the people who look disheveled or homeless. Like Greg for example, my favorite reveal of 2013, who sends postcards to Cornell (“He’s probably lying,” says my boyfriend). In the case of the piss-drunk man, he is just a piss-drunk man, not a gallerist on a night out, not the director of an LA museum, just a piss-drunk man asking for a free beer.
ii.
When I picture Thomas Kinkade falling off his barstool drunk, I imagine him yelling “I’m the Painter of Light, bitch!” as he groped that woman’s breast on the way down.
