Amerika

Trends: when something “looks cool” so a group of people do it, figuring that because others are doing it, there’s no need to critically analyze the behavior. For this reason, trends are exclusively oriented toward appearance and not structure or reality.

For decades he was almost an urban legend, his harrowing performances — the year he punched a time clock hourly, the year he lived on the streets, the year he spent tethered by a rope to a female artist — kept alive by talk.

Mr. Hsieh found himself ensnared in the benumbing life of an illegal immigrant. With the downtown art scene vibrating around him, he eked out a living at Chinese restaurants and construction jobs, feeling alien, alienated and creatively barren until it came to him: He could turn his isolation into art. Inside an unfinished loft, he could build himself a beautiful cage, shave his head, stencil his name onto a uniform and lock himself away for a year.

Thirty years later Mr. Hsieh’s “Cage Piece” is on display at the Museum of Modern Art as the inaugural installation in a series on performance art.

NYT

This isn’t art; it’s shit.

But when you have a crowd of mostly incompetent irresponsible people, they want to tear down all difficult things and make them trivial, so they can imagine they, too, would be capable of the redefined “greatness.”

This is why our crowds fall all over themselves trying to praise illiterate pentatonic warblers are geniuses, stoned incoherent novelists as visionaries, and finally, poseur jerkoffs as “great artists.”

Is it any wonder that we always have favorites like this Hsieh guy, but none of them ever find an enduring place in the hearts of normal people, like great art from the past? Normal people love Jane Austen; stupid hipster elites who are justifying their meagre salaries through the pretension of being ueber-educated artists love Hsieh.

Signs of the decline, my droogs.