©Caligula [For Cantanker]
“When one considers excess in a historical context, one thinks in awe of Babylon of the bible, sultans like Achaemenids with hundreds of wives, Chinese emperors with 20000 concubines… If all you do is watch TV today, you think of Britney Spears. My soul is satisfied as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth offers praises with joyful lips. I’m a god, so I only think of myself, & anything else I want to think about! Haha!
“You have to be a romantic to appreciate the truly overdoing of things, for without an ideal how could righteous outrage blossom? This was Byron’s key, and the Marquis’ as well! Guilt and gilt are the double helix by which religions are born, the elevation and descent of fame’s boomerang. Right now, they cover for enslavement, as they always have. Haha!
“Your paparazzi are garish clowns standing in for the wealthiest among you, the ones who despise the downward spirals of the poor from pinnacles of false success! The media spoonfeed the mob their gossip and filth and the drug-addled citizenry revel in the entertainment. Meanwhile your US Senate gives the Emperor god George Bush and his minions anything he asks for and they demand, be it blood, flesh, treasure or tragedy. Senators – HAHAHAHA! I preferred the carnage of the Coliseum, myself! Fair and balanced? I mandated the Senators’ wives serve Rome as whores!
“Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’m the ghost of Caligula. After the inevitable treachery and assassination, my hastily buried bones were, contrary to the legends, not properly disposed of at length by my sisters, and so yet I roam, the great specter of ancient excess. I assume you’ve seen by cinema? Don’t you adore my bio-pics? Last year I was in Venice again for the Biennale! HaHa!
“Let me tell you. They don’t compare to the reality show. I’m hanging out here in Vegas at the Monte Carlo, which is burning, an homage to a fiddle-sawing pal of mine, in the most Roman of all today’s great Roman cities. From someone who’s done it all, to you, who haven’t, I can say that I feel right at home, and if you can’t do it all anymore – after all, I’m almost two thousand years old and made of less than dust – Viagra will not be curing my ED anytime soon… At least you can SEE it all. Sometimes that’s even naughtier (and certainly less sticky!) Being a voyeur and a god are similar in mode, if not style.
“A perfect muse, an associate who happens to remind me of dear Drusilla, looked me up after Jason Rhoades took his last boat ride (I kept him company and the dogs off). As an afterthought, and practically everything this muse thinks of is one of those, she asked that I cameo in an artist’s dream – and Hera we are! Sorry. Old Joke and no good if you can’t punctuate with a thrust or slice, or a dramatic thumb-down. I did a goddish scan of the artist’s brain, spoke to the moon and Jupiter, and am ready to comment on the art of excess. For my money (Drusilla is on the coins I love best), I favor Dave Hickey’s Laguna Art Museum show “Las Vegas Diaspora: Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland,” as the best recent example of excessively beautiful art in recent memory. If you can’t visit the museum before the show closes in June, buy the catalog. Hickey almost single-handedly re-introduced beauty to the fine art discourse, and this is a curatorial collection of works by students who migrated through Hickey’s car culture-loving miasma of populist art thoughts. Have your sunglasses at the ready, which you will, because it’s Laguna – talk about “excess!” Haha!
“Let’s get something straight, shall we? Art is not excessive, just expensive, whether you’re dealing with obelisks or odalisques, relative to the cost of wine and war. America knows this better than anybody since the Roma of my day! The artist McLean, a damned north Briton – walls could not stop their plunder – was concerned with ©Murakami and a show called “Some Paintings” put together by one of Los Angeles’ A-list art critics, a scribe by the name of Doug Harvey, when I scanned his brain for research dreams in March.
“These two exhibits point at the horizontal influence of excess, namely the erasure of the individual under the brand of the State’s protection (of free expression cum profit), the conquest of public space for personal gain, conflict of interest promoted as standard operating procedure in the commons, the entrenchment of the ugly-loving wag over the beauty-loving wage-earner and so on. As a countermeasure, McLean would offer you a little show like the Claremont Museum’s “First Generation: Art in Claremont, 1907 – 1957,” showcasing Millard Sheets, Walter Mix and Karl Benjamin, or another little show of David Smith and Jeffrey Vallance (the latter also loves Senators!) at Margo Leavin Gallery in LA. If you don’t live in LA you won’t hear about the Claremont show, or the show at Margo’s, or probably even the big show of Harvey’s picks at Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. As Dick Cheney, in all his excessive glory, intoned, “So?”
“If you were in LA, you would just mosey down to Bergamot, if you want to see excess age well, then visit Larry Bell at Frank Lloyd’s gallery. But shows like these always come and go, like expectant virgins! One thing you’ll discover about excess by visiting shows like these is how devoid of blood they are. If you want to revel in excess, visit the aftermath of a bomb blast in Baghdad, like I did last night. Ah, now that is sweet excess that wipes away all the truth across the horizon, Whitman-like. Where’s the artworld equivalent of Tom Joad now? So, in this moment of excess in an age after ages of excess, go watch There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, both filmed in the illusion of a Texas that gave you this President of yours, a man-god after my own heart, even if he proclaims himself only an elevated servant – as a Roman ghost god, I can look beyond his speech and witness the scenes of heart and mind that provide pleasures, smiles in one suspended between worlds. Sometime he’ll be like me, after practicing on the likes of foes like Putin for a few ages.
“Excess expresses in the world of power, treasure and sex. You will hear about this ©Murakami show, if not the others. It is by far the most excessively empty of blood. Some will whisper that it expresses nothing more than that reality of excess. As one who died under the blades of those assigned to protect me, taking a shortcut home, I would suggest another reading. This is art that we speak of, and I am also speaking as the world’s first great performance artist. Did you ever hear of my watery horse ride (I couldn’t swim)? If commerce enslaves the artist, who morphs, or trans-animates into a pursemaker and cartoonist and caricaturist, a factory producer, but really a factory worker in the robes of a genius savant, then is this attraction or entertainment? I am a slave to both! I knew Andy Warhol, and you, ©, are not Andy Warhol (but then, neither was he!). You are a traditional Japanese artist, forging copies of hybrids of worlds of no more depth than the parades on your scrolls. You are more Disney than Barney, though you certainly are both. At least your performance mimics the happy.
“On the other hand, there is hate, which you shouldn’t mimic, because it should never be coupled with reason, and writing is always more reasonable than blood. The critic’s show was Hell, of which I also know much. Harvey hung too many bodies in a too strong tree. This shouldn’t be permitted – it’s something a Senator would do, whenever it’s time to punish the Senate in just that way. Now they call it “tossing someone under the bus.” I prefer crosses. Harvey put the worst thing he could find by a beautiful artist next to an artwork that makes the ones around it ugly, again and again, seventy times in all, each murder in turn diagnosed and autopsied by the critic, in the manner of biography of the artist so impaled. Fantastically hateful work… I always appreciate when the System elevates someone who hates his fate to the public stage to celebrate failure or to hide worse ones or to oppress the Good Better or Best Choice from the weakened mob. I appreciate this tactic most, of course, because it was my greatest gift and skill. You’ll not hear about Harvey’s show, likely, because the better excess happened across town at the new Broad Center for Contemporary Art! Exactly the same curatorial approach and presentation (check out the Cyndi Sherman debacle) – just more of everything at stake and expended! Haha! Broad and Gago: now that’s excessive! Google ‘em, Americans & you’ll get it!
Until we meet on the far shore, may your excess be free of consequence, or better yet, make someone else pay! Like Bear Sterns! Haha!
