The Model

[grinninfoole]

I just spent $10 to see a really bad event in the performance space at Thorne's Market. (Here's the story in the Hampshire Gazette that lured me in: http://www.gazettenet.com/03132003/entertai/4229.htm) I won't even call it a show, because it wasn't. The flyer has an attractive young woman on it and a slogan: "... not just another fashion statement" In fact, however, that is just exactly what it is. The man of the one man show, Lee Ross, came out and gave an informal lecture for an hour. He talked as if he was just chatting for a bit before actually doing the show that we had paid to see, all the while telling us about his performances with Cirque Du Soleil, trips to New Zealand and Australia, street performing in Boulder CO and writing screen plays which are apparently being optioned in Hollywood. He has seen and been very impressed by the Matrix (he gives a half-assed rendition of Morpheus explaining the Matrix to Neo) and believes that there can be a better form of media out there, something more interactive than whatever exists today. How it would work, what good it would be, who it would serve, what it would be like, and how it would really be better he doesn't actually say beyond a few vague notions literally sketched on a sheet of paper. He does offer some homespun jargon for contemporary media culture (none of which was memorable, interesting, or useful) and he makes really pathetic attempts to explain the golden mean and the pythagorean or regular solids. He didn't relate them to anything else and as far as I could tell he didn't really understand any of the concepts he referred to. After subjecting us to his pseudo-intellectualism for an hour, string us along before getting whatever his point was, he stopped. In the end, it was all a big load of empty nothing, a complete waste of time and money.

There was more to hate than this, actually. Mr. Ross also took time out to display his enormous cynicism and grubbiness of soul by mocking the pretentions and mannerisms of various entertainment executives whose only apparent fault has been to a willingness to hire Mr. Ross. Indeed, he made a point of contrasting himself to their superficiality, their naked willingness to exploit others. Having spent an hour observing Mr. Ross while fruitlessly waiting for him to perform the advertised performance, I am at a loss to perceive any difference. Certainly, he never actually entertained me. Sydneycat is going to ask for our money back tomorrow from the Northampton Box Office.

Hmmm. Syd opined that the 'show' felt like a pitch for a timeshare in the Berkshires. After checking out the website on the flyer (http://www.applywithin.com/index.html) I have discovered that, in fact, the show IS a marketing pitch. So, it's official: Lee Ross is a whore, a fraud and a swindler. May he rot in the Hollywood hell he claims to hate.

Comments

sucktastic

[millari.livejournal.com]

I just hope Syd got her money back and yours too. Although I was utterly dissatisfied with my experience at this show, I didn't ask for mine back I think because I feel like "art" is this completely open term that in the end, is able to encompass anything that anyone wishes to label thusly. I support that. This open-ended philosophy does unfortunately allow for the possibility of carpetbaggers like I believe Ross to be. But if I were to ask for my money back, I would have to feel like it made sense for someone to demand their money back for attending a Warhol exhibit of portraits, due to the fact that these portraits were meant not only to be works of art, but also advertisements targeted at future portrait sitters.

Would I have demanded my money back after seeing Duchamp's urinal at the Armory show? I don't know. It was a freakin' urinal! I know that Duchamp is interpreted to have a point beyond hucksterism, but many people who went to the Armory show were as angry and outraged afterwards as you and Syd were Friday night. Barring any imposed external interpretation, what was any more impressive about Duchamp's throwing up a urinal and calling it art than Ross' half-assed rambling musings? Who's to say that Duchamp was any less disingenuous in labelling his piece art than Ross was? Then there's the whole question of, are art exhibits by their very nature a sales pitch, since they are in large part advertisements for the artist, who wishes to recruit future sales of his work?

I do keep coming back to the instinct that Friday night didn't *feel* at all like art, and it did definitely feel like hucksterism, and so I have decided that what Ross is is a carpetbagger in the world of fine arts. However, I'm still uncomfortable about asking for my money back because I feel that there's somehow some slippery slope between me demanding my money back for a show I refused to accept as art and Jesse Helms cancelling NEA grants.

You see the kind of paralyzng relativist connundrums I can often get myself into? It's one of the reasons I need a blue canary by the lightswitch who can look at a situation in a clear-eyed manner and say simply, "I want my $12 back."

Re: sucktastic

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Well, according to Stephen Jay Gould, Duchamp's 'found art' apparently wasn't actually found, at all. Gould claims that all of the supposedly banal, functional bits of mundanity that one could find in any catalog were in fact NEVER in any catalog, and moreover would not actually work, and were in fact so designed that they COULDN'T. I don't know if this is true, but I do know that Gould has asserted this. This, I think, is quite different from what Ross did.

Happy to watch over you. :)