The Art Fair Mukbang

Art Fairs, Art Shows, Art Sales, and Art Auctions.  Currently in New York, the Armory Show, NADA, the Independent, Volta, Spring Break, and on and on, to London, Basel, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, exactly like the repeating cycles of fashion week in New York, London, Milan, Paris, and replay.  The seasons and cycles of buying and selling—retail.

The proliferation of art commerce where the age old paradigm of “success” is based on unfathomable trends and whimsies, still makes manifest a sort of pyramidal structure, where the “best” is supposed to rise to the top and this is in turn celebrated by people with money that one would call the “elite” at the exclusive and expensive art fairs by the most cash-flushed art galleries.  

This retail of an Uber luxury objects is predicated on a simulacrum of meritocracy, even though it is (and one hears the complacent “always has been”) a place for financial speculation, a bit of money laundering perhaps, and most certainly a certain stage to show off one’s riches.  It is understandable. The gallery and the museum system of our late capitalism, needing large amounts of money to operate, is a market place where money is to be made, where certain amounts of money can be hidden, and even cleansed.  This system will ostentatiously insist that meritocracy is despite it all still the vindicated “reality.”  Why wouldn’t it?  If the system is not the true purveyor of merit and importance, why should one pay it any mind?  It’s existence is bolstered by the belief that it is the main stage where the “worthwhile” can be seen, and, of course, purchased, and merchandised.

As the purveyors of what is fine and worthwhile do not necessarily have a rationale in their judgement, everything is taken down to a basic “I will know it is good when I see it, I will know it in my gut.” This type of judgement, intuitive at best, downright ignorant, at worst, tends to be exclusionary, as it is a learned set of criteria, a cauldron of cultural prejudice, learned exclusions, and categorical thinking. 

All this to say that perhaps our gluttonous unhinged capitalistic era is best embodied in the non-ironic videos of a YouTube Star, Trisha Paytas (Ryan Trecartin, eat your heart out).  If it is all about entertainment anyway, between the joke and disaster that is the Trump presidency, and the cynicism that is the puppet Republican congress in the US, one just wonders, at the end of the day, maybe a Trisha Paytas mukbang video is culturally more meaningful than any immersive transformative installation that one could possibly go to—art pretending to be critical of a system in which it is complicit and actively engaged.   After all, when Trisha Paytas films herself pigging out on pizzas, KFC and donuts, she does not pretend to be doing anything but gluttony.  She implicitly reveals her complete unexamined complicity in the system, brand names and all.  Perhaps this is the true paradigm of how to be successful in our time.