Cairey has no authentic answer, save commodifying his loathsomely innate monkey-wishes for penile penitents, for spasms of recognition followed by shame & regret- as if in the wake of any orgasm he’d ever find his fundamental misery & loneliness absolved. This comfort had never come. The thought itself disgusts him now. But everything disgusts him now, especially himself.
He’d done the math before. It was a long time ago, before he’d got his first-ever girlfriend. After doing the calculations, he’d sworn off dating in favor of virtual reality pornography. He’d invested in a Tinkerbell- that most prestigious brand of synthetic holes, the crown jewel of Sinflate’s “Neverland Collection.” It saved him hundreds, if not thousands a year by his calculation. He had almost caved again a few months prior. His digital hand hovered over the purchase. He didn’t though, as this would have confirmed his eternal loneliness. He still had a small hope of emerging from the brink of normality & staking a claim of the Good Life. He knew the power of these intoxicating fumes. He knew the reprieves of total degeneration. He had lived within their spells for years & had decided, after years of decline, to escape them once & for all or to kill himself & escape them all at once. For a brief period of his life, before he had fucked it all up, he thought he had escaped his misery- but he had only gone south from there.
He knew how simple it could be- should he disabuse himself of this ignoble devotion to Love, whatever that meant anymore. If he considered himself to be no better than a beast with various appetites then how cheaply he could be assuaged- to be a mongrel, to be free... This is what he had thought when he had succumbed to the virtual quellings of all of his desires, only to always find himself at the end of the weekend, at the end of some hedonic bender, feeling the first pang of diminishing returns, alone, & without any further means to assuage his miseries. With a brain fried & devoid of serotonin, he always felt suicidally awful & repentant. He tossed & turned unable to fall asleep or else tormented with bad dreams, promising that he’d straighten up. There were only so many ways he could distract himself from the incorrigible fact of his loneliness before it returned with a vengeance.
It was this dream of escape that had a real hold on him- this notion of Love was only one of its guises. All of these hurdles in the way of his satisfaction were his jailers- bastards- dangling chains of resplendent skeleton keys, promises of freedom & paradise, offering to remove his fetters- for a price, & one he never had the money to pay...
He cannot tell who he thinks is more perverse- these conspiracy conglomerates, these corporate voyeurs in the industries of Love, cheering him on, & laughing at him behind the one- way mirrors of the digital economy- or himself, knowing that their gaze is always upon him, & knowing that they know he knows, & knowing still, performs for them, hoping someday that they free him from his abjection, like a circus chimpanzee.
This is what passes through his mind as they leave the ticket booth. His date retrieves her collapsible selfie-stick from her purse as they pass through the rope-maze gauntlet toward the coat-check. She smiles at it as it extends in her hand. Cairey hands their coats to the coatcheck & receives two tokens- oversized & ruby-red coins engraved with the numbers 19 & 21. He slips them into his back pocket alongside his receipts & infront of his wallet. They join another line, this time for the entrance to the permanent exhibition which is titled: “Artists in Residence.”
Looking around at their comrades in the queue, Cairey finds a panoply of pairs- old & young, newlyweds & divorces, semblant twins & opposites... some silent, some laughing, some whispering back & forth, & most are looking at their phones, but almost none of them, he notices, are wearing bracelets, & some of these unbraceleted pairs pass through the security check- they are scanned, searched, patted down- but they enter the exhibition unbraceleted. He wonders why this is, & thinks that this might make acceptable fodder for small talk.
“Hey” he asks his date, “how can they get in without bracelets? Do you think they’re VIPs? Do they have student passes or something? You know- the last time I was here was...”
She shoots him a quizzical glance.
“No, they’re just general admissions. Anyone can go into the main exhibition without a bracelet- well, if they don’t want to bring a camera inside. That’s just a suggested donation. The expositions are what you have to pay for- & also the photography passes. It’s a really smart idea in my opinion, considering you can watch the exhibition from anywhere...”
Cairey fumbles for his receipt & spies the surcharges he hadn’t noticed- two photography passes, two tickets to both wings of the exposition... He sullenly says “I don’t have a camera or
a phone though.” She replies “You don’t have a phone? Wow. Well, you should have said something. I figured you’d want to take some pictures, I mean-. that’s what the MEH is all about- I mean, what would be the point, like, if you didn’t have anything to remember? Look-” she raises the selfie-stick- “Smile!”
She smarms & ducks her lips in an overblown ironical fashion. Cairey cringes.
He’s avoided being photographed since the night of that aforementioned colossal fuck-up- which is etched as deeply in his mind as in the digital panopticon of artificial memory- all the social media posts & ratings from his acquaintance network, his former coworkers, his former peers, all of his “friends”- every bit of data in which he is captured unconsenting, as in every photograph ever taken of him- whenever his face is scanned & tagged & stripped for metadata, exposing how he is seen by others, magnifying his every flaw, & replicating it infinitely. It is all of these photos that compose the body of his simulated doppelganger- his evil twin, & it is this figure, & not his real self, he thinks, who is truly judged & shuffled about by the almighty forgers of the cybercommercial chains in which he, the innocent one, finds himself so tightly bound & squirming.
In both pictures, as in most pictures, he dons the pained expression of a kidnappee who wishes to convey through the camera lens, to whatever audience receives him, a contradictory combination of hope & desperation- a face which begs just as well for ransom as for the merciful deliverance of a bullet through the brain.
She, however, dons that practiced expression from that practiced angle- nearly isometric in its vantage, angled down, from a height above her forehead- a skill that women hone over years of autophotography. She isn’t smiling quite- no, it's quite more like a Noh mask- carved precisely to represent, from a high angle, the concept of duplicity- but from a lower & less charitable angle, fraud.
The photograph is taken. The contrast of their mugs is unappealing.
The line shuffles a step forward as a pair gain entrance to the exhibition. With their entrance, the exhibition is deemed to be at capacity, which halts the flow of the line to a dribble.
She frowns at the photo, biting into an unpictured pimple below her lower lip. She’s not perfectly pleased with it & it will not accompany her Kale Breakfast Salad & Matcha-infused Green Russian in her social media records. Cairey catches a glimpse of it & is surprised at its resemblance to the last photo of himself he’d seen. He thought perhaps he’d changed since then, that he’d improved since then, but knows better now. He looks even worse, like a boil emerging from an otherwise exemplary specimen of the average human female. Though his companion in the last photo was a different girl, one whose name Cairey could never misplace, which he remembers all too easily despite its complete uselessness in his present circumstance- Helen... She had been his only girlfriend- or at least, sort-of, considering the perpetually “open” status of their commitments. She had been a fixture in his life for several
years, & would have been for several more at the very least, had they not severed on that day of that unfathomably unfortunate fuckup.
His current date bears a slight resemblance to his ex- a diminished doubling, a knock off, or even a parody, kept close like any bargain alternative for the subliminal effect of price anchoring. Even still, her curated stacks of photo-enhancements cannot elevate her to the stat
us of the former. Her nose is larger & less refined in its sculpture. Her eyebrows are too thin. Her eyes are just slightly too far apart. It’s as if his ex’s face has been stretched & compressed in subtle ways.
These algorithms, he thinks, offer a horrible glance into the sameness of everything- how they pair him with her, again, but with diminishing aura. He looks away from the phone as she meddles through her various feeds. Perhaps, he thinks, they know me better than I know myself. Maybe she’s perfect for me. What do I know?
Beside the line is a large plaque commemorating the foundational donors to the Museum of Expressive Humanism. Cairey reads distinguished WASPish names like Jeremen Ingram III, Violette Yates... alongside the names of Saudi sultans, media moguls, tech billionaires, bankers, lawyers, & every sort of person-of-means. He imagines them gathered at some gala, writing checks as if they were signing autographs- the monetary figures entirely unreal to them, except as tax write-offs, accountants’ suggestions, or a bored trophy wife’s diversions. So many columns of names, like the deceased at a war memorial or the phonebook pages of yesteryear- cacophonies of names stacked in a pyramid formation, accorded position in proportion to investment, & at their peak is- The LaFeint Foundation?
How interesting, Cairey thinks.
He turns to his date, his mouth jutting cautiously agape, his arms raising to get her attention- then - no. She is distracted, flicking through pictures of what he assumes are friends- a girl leaning on the Eiffel Tower, liked- a plate of charcuterie beside a foamy mug of beer, liked- a fluffy cat grumpily glaring from the bottom of a garbage can, liked... the images pass so swiftly he can barely make them out. No- better not, he thinks.
They’d already discussed the show & she was not nearly as devoted as he was & what would be the point? He’d point at the name, she’d say “oh weird” & return to her feed of fragmented moments shared from all across the globe, novelties unending & fluxious, but personally meaningful in their referentiality to real acquaintances- the very opposite of these gilded names of donors, so cold, unchanging, irrelevant & impersonal. No one cares, Cairey.
He glances at the next panel. It is the mission statement of the Museum. Here we go, he thinks, this should be entertaining.
It reads:
The Museum of Expressive Humanism is unlike any Museum ever before imagined. We have no permanent collections of artifacts. We have no antiquities. We have no gems. What we collect is not “art” as it has been called, but we believe that this old idea of “art” is as anachronistic as monarchy. The King is dead. Art is dead. & what is dead no longer lives. & what is not here for us now, still living, unique & breathing with the vitalistic energy of the human spirit, no longer exists for us.
What we are interested in collecting, here at the MEH, are living expressions of what is human, by the humans who are living, here & now. We display living Artists while other museums are mausoleums that catalogue the dead. They only look backwards, & we do not. Instead, we look around.
Try it out. There is no need to consider your visit to the MEH over when you have passed beyond its perimeter. We do not offer sights to be seen. We grant permission to see. Look around you. Revel in the perceptual experience. Every fully embodied moment of humanity’s living self-expression is, for us, here at the MEH, an artistic masterpiece.
Cairey wonders who wrote this shit & what the fuck does it even mean & is it a joke?
The line shuffles forward a bit, as a large group exits the exhibition.
Cairey wonders if he’ll get answers to his questions beyond the door. He has a better view now that he’s closer to it. He can see the light & shadow spill from its cracks when it’s ajar. He can hear the clatter of overlapping voices inside, for a moment, before they are muted by the weight of the door.
She is still flicking through her phone. He passes time by reading the plaque over & over, until it is finally their turn to enter.
She slips her phone back into her purse. They display their bracelets. They’re searched. Then the door to the Exhibition is opened for them. Immediately, Cairey recognizes how much it has changed since the last time he’d seen it.
THE EXHIBITION
Originally, in the exhibition room, there had been booths set up like Catholic confessionals. & in these booths, some staffed by “artists in residence” & others by guest volunteers, people could either ask questions provided for them on queue cards or answer them, interacting with whoever their booth happened to contain. The idea, so he was told by his Professor, was that it was an experimental curation of anonymous human interest, of communication-as-such. He had only passed through, as he’d been assigned to review the exhibit & give a presentation on it for his class on “The Politics of Curation.”
He’d entered a booth & was asked “How are you?” by an anonymous voice. He’d replied “Fine I guess.” He’d thought “Is this really it?” & then asked the anonymous voice the same. It laughed & replied “I think I’m the one who’s supposed to ask the questions here. So um, here, it says: ‘Are you Art?’” This farce had bothered Cairey so much that he’d stormed out of the booth, the museum, & back to his dorm room, where he wrote a scathing review drenched in irony which praised the Exhibition & the Museum for perfectly exemplifying the vapid totality of human existence & endeavor under Late Industrial Capitalism, which could be summarised as a series of worthless commodities & accidental encounters of bodies in the market, price signals, accompanied by noises in the dark, all amounting to nothing but a colossal waste of time & effort.
His visit to the Museum had been one of the contributing factors to his first change in major, from Socio-Hegemonic Interrogation & Theory to Aesthetic Praxis & Explication. It was his presentation of his review of the Museum which sealed the deal.
He’d found himself alone in his loathing. While everyone else had cheerfully described some serendipitous encounter with a stranger who had such-and-such touching tripe to say. The more “academic” types used the exhibit as an excuse to furnish a monologue with bits of jargon they’d gleaned from their assigned readings- “something something semiotics something something dissimulation something something challenging radical deterritorializing mimetic something about the Other, the Encounter with the Other, the Mirror reflecting the Other, the Gaze of the Other, to be seen or unseen by the Other, to be or not to be, or not to not to be, but to appear to not to be the Other for the Other in the Otherness of an Other...”- each keyword here lilting in the tone of a question, accompanied by a doe-eyed look to the Professor who nodded approvingly of the word, or frowned, & tapped his pen, until other keywords were proffered- “maybe not the Other as such- but the Shadow of the Other?”- the password guessed, the frown transvaluated to a grin & a nod- the presenter’s sentence even ending there, dangling, unfinished, as the words “Good, who’s next?” summoned the next paroxysm of puerile pathos or pontification.
Cairey was not well liked. But he was used to this. When it was his turn to present, he’d stood before his peers & said “The Exhibition was stupid. It sucked. It was not Art. It was a waste of my time. I did not understand what anyone here was going on about in their presentations or what the purpose of this assignment was or why it was required of me. Maybe I am an idiot. I just thought that the General Arts Youniversity was supposed to teach us how to draw & paint & make, I don’t know, Art?”
He had been cut off here by the flustered gazes of Every-Other, chiefest of whom being his Professor, who had tired of Cairey’s insolence & ignorance from day one. He was bothered by his parochial biases, his pretentious dismissals of Ideas which were clearly beyond his ken, his dull refusal of Theories which he refused to engage. He asked Cairey to stay after class. He gave him the suggestion of switching courses & departments to one chaired by Doctor McTeuf, who taught “Material Art History” & gave seminars on the development of technique- seminars which he had been using as a laboratory to draft his ever-forthcoming magnum opus, “The History of Technique,” from which only his chapter on th
e development of pigments had been published, almost a decade prior, which had been so well-received that it got him his position at the Youniversity in the first place.
Cairey’s Professor had considered this a devilish prank on his part, as Doctor McTeuf was known as the most boring & anachronistic member of the faculty. To his chagrin, Cairey & McTeuf got along quite well, after the latter had recognized the former’s surname from his research into the history of blue dyes.
McTeuf was a very old man, but he had a youthful immaturity about him. He cracked jokes & did not take his work very seriously. Grades were treated casually & assignments were nearly voluntary. In his course, Cairey learned all about the networks that undergirded the production of art through history. He learned about the Phoenicians, & how Tyrian purple, harvested from the shells of predatory snails, supported their often forgotten mercantile empire. He learned about Ultramarine, the mystery of the orient, made of lapis lazuli, & carried by merchant networks across the Silk Road to Europe, where it was reserved for depictions of the holiest of holies, while the less pure azurite, whose color faded in the sun, was used by artists of the less sacred, & that is, less wealthy. He learned about Cobalt blue, which had been known to the Chinese for centuries, but had only been invented in Europe in the industrial era. He learned how it poisoned its handlers, draining them of their iron reserves, & crippling them with anemia. He learned about Prussian Blue, which was an accidental byproduct of alchemy & had been used for everything from blueprints to medicine to poison, as it was, at its core, at the very center of its snowflake atomic structure, iron, surrounded by cyanide, an element named, wouldn’t you know, from the Greek word for blue. He learned about International Klein Blue, invented in the 20th century, which had become considered an art in and of itself, as the conception of art had changed to resemble mass production. Popular culture was itself an expression of this mode of production. The pigment had become the canvas. The product had become the production. This was the end of his course, as McTeuf announced that this was the end of art, an understanding of the techniques of production, no different from the history of beer or wine or furniture or clothes. Once it was shorn of its sacramental ideology, what remained was the transit of commodities & innovations in reproductive industry, & later, publicity.
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