May 16, 2014 Arts & Culture Present and Absent By Hunter Braithwaite The art world comes to Mexico City. Mexico City’s Material Art Fair. Photo: Komplot In a few hours, a conference room on the fourth floor of Mexico City’s Hilton Reforma will swing open and the third day of the Material Art Fair will commence. But it’s five a.m., and I’m on the sixth floor, in the heated indoor pool, with about five near-naked and naked artists and a bottle of mescal bobbing in the shallow end. None of us has a room here. Lenin said you can’t trust artists because they can navigate all levels of society. In this case, that means all floors of the Hilton. The evening began yesterday at a Mariachi bar. I proceeded to a store selling giant micheladas that had the mouthfeel of a Papa John’s pizza in a cup. Then I went to a grimy rave. Then to the end-of-the-world wealth of a penthouse party in Polanco where the free sushi meant that at least two people were doing blow off of chopsticks, and where, in line for a marble bathroom indecorously coated in piss, I met a Spanish developer named Iggy who was building an entire village with Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architecture firm, on a stretch of virgin Mexican coast. After that, I picked up more mescal and sat on the desolate, please-abduct-me corner of a Centro Histórico street, pulling from the same bottle now bobbing in the Hilton pool’s shallow end. I live in Miami, where for weeks the talk had been about Mexico City. When do you get in? Where are you staying? The contemporary art fairs Zona Maco and Material both opened in the first week of February. Why not go? To work in the culture industry is to justify any type of vacation or prolonged period of dicking around as research. As a supposed arbiter of transcendence, art and its surrounding world has of late succumbed to stasis and homogeny. Things feel the same. An unceasing focus on the contemporary has culture in the doldrums of a present-tense continuous, defined by a million identical white-cube galleries and purple-carpeted convention halls. But it takes a lot of movement to feel like you’re staying in one place. Everyone—collectors, artists, curators, handlers, advisors—is launched into a ceaseless grand tour of the capitals of capital, armed with VIP cards to the nameless Biennials and Fairs wobbling skyward Babel-style. Nowhere is this more evident than in Miami, which to many seems an art fair with a city attached. The parties and the velvet-rope-divided subjectivities are as much a part of a naturalized cultural terrain as the academy and the museum are in other cities. For artists here, drinking and schmoozing are not just that—they’re praxis. So I booked a flight to Mexico City. Everyone was going. Read More
May 16, 2014 On the Shelf Avoid Cholera with a Healthy Beard, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A twenty-three-year-old Viennese woman, drawn before and after contracting cholera in 1831. Image via Wired.com Say Jesus Christ dictates a book to you in a dream—who holds the copyright? Is it you or is it Jesus of Nazareth? “Donne, in one of his regrettably few statements about how ‘Metricall compositions’ are made, referred to the putting together of a poem as ‘the shutting up.’ An unfortunate term, and we could use a better one; because there can’t be much doubt that the shaping of a poem is also a pressure, in which the binding energy of the poem brings everything inside its perimeter to incandescence.” Let’s give franchise novels their due: “It’s a plain fact of publishing life that more people will read the latest Star Wars franchise novel than all the books shortlisted for last year’s Booker prize put together.” Unsurprisingly, nineteenth-century medical texts are full of disturbingly wondrous illustrations. While we’re on medicine in the nineteenth century: doctors in the Victorian era recommended that men grow beards to stay healthy. “The Victorian obsession with air quality saw the beard promoted as a sort of filter. A thick beard, it was reasoned, would capture the impurities before they could get inside the body. Others saw it as a means of relaxing the throat, especially for those whose work involved public speaking.”
May 15, 2014 First Person Hey, That’s My Snare Drum! By Dan Piepenbring This drum is mine. Last week, the Times recognized a new trend in vigilantism: do-it-yourself iPhone recovery. When someone finds his phone stolen, he uses the phone’s GPS to locate the thief; the resulting confrontations usually end peacefully, with the phone restored to its rightful owner and the thief shuffling off into the night, cowed and shamed. In one especially rousing case, a man rustled up the thief using OkCupid: He lured the thief to his Brooklyn apartment building by posing as a woman and flirting with him on the dating service. When the thief arrived with a bottle of wine, expecting to meet “Jennifer,” Mr. Nirenberg went up behind him, hammer at his side. He slapped a $20 bill on the thief, to mollify him and compensate him for his time and wine, and demanded the phone. The thief handed it over and slunk away. Instead of giving that man the key to the city, the fuzz have advised against this kind of justice. Of course they have: no one likes to feel redundant. In the supercilious words of an LAPD spokesman, “It’s just a phone … Let police officers take care of it. We have backup, guns, radio, jackets—all that stuff civilians don’t have.” As if LA’s finest would, in their eminent wisdom, break out the flak jackets and heavy artillery to liberate your telephone. I’m here to tell you: you can be your own authority. Read More
May 15, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Lisa By Sadie Stein John Singer Sargent, A Dinner Table at Night, 1884 Last week, I was invited to a fancy dinner in honor of a personage in the international art scene who had curated an interactive installation in an urban high school. More specifically, my rather more impressive friend was invited, and he asked if he might bring me. Not being much of a personage in the international art scene or otherwise, I was both excited and nervous. The night before, I tried on and rejected several dresses before deciding on a black lace vintage frock I had picked up at a thrift store some months before, and had altered but never worn. Having had a haircut four days before, I decided to eke a little more mileage out of my increasingly mangy blowout, and I put on my old denim jacket as a sort of security blanket. The dinner was held in the private room of an austerely chic downtown restaurant. It was already filled with people when we arrived—some recognizable, many beautiful, all looking like personages. The room contained several long tables bedecked with place cards. I accepted a glass of wine and tried to look less anxious. But when my friend went outside for a cigarette, I went with him. When we returned to the room, everyone was seated. Someone called to my friend to come sit next to her; he had been placed near some famous people in the center of the table. I looked around, but I already knew: there was no place card for me. Everyone else was seated. A waiter murmured in my ear that someone hadn’t shown up; I could sit in her seat for the moment. Read More
May 15, 2014 World Cup 2014 The Rebirth of Colombia By David Gendelman A team emerges from the shadow of its past. Teams in the World Cup are generally split among three tiers. The top one consists of those that year in and year out field the best squads in the world—including most of the previous World Cup winners and finalists, such as Brazil, Germany, and Argentina. The bottom tier consists of those from whom no one expects much, other than that they show up on time for matches. Among that group this year are Iran, Australia, and Algeria. But most teams fall somewhere in that second tier, where fans begin the tournament holding out hope that—through a perfect storm of lucky bounces, mistaken calls, beneficial match draws, and brilliant overachievement—their team will cobble together a World Cup championship. Colombia, who have qualified for the World Cup for the first time in sixteen years, is one of these teams. “We qualified for the 1962 World Cup, and the best thing you could say about the Colombian team from then until 1990 was that we tied with Russia in 1962 … It wasn’t even a victory,” said the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, forty-one, the author of the highly acclaimed 2011 novel The Sound of Things Falling, and an avid soccer fan who has closely followed the Colombian team his entire life. “Football is a very big element of the national unity. So the importance that football has had for Colombia has not been really reflected in the results on an international scale.” Read More
May 15, 2014 Bulletin It’s Plimpton! Time By Dan Piepenbring Tomorrow night at nine, Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself premieres on PBS as part of their American Masters series. The documentary tells of our late founder’s many exploits—fireworks commissioner, Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser pitchman, libretto writer—and features new interviews with, among others, his family, Robert Kennedy Jr., Hugh Hefner, Gay Talese, Graydon Carter, and his colleagues here at The Paris Review. American Masters has also put together a history of Plimpton’s work with the magazine. But if you’re a true, incorrigible Plimptomaniac—and who among us is not?—PBS has two gifts for you. The first: an extended preview of the film, streaming live tonight at seven. The second: a series of George Plimpton trading cards. Collect ’em all! These cards capture the Plimp in his various guises and pay tribute to his storied career. They have fun Plimp facts, pithy Plimp quotes, and rare Plimp pix—they’re Topps! (Bubblegum not included.) Here’s our man as a boxer; here, as a pitcher; here a goalie, a trapeze artist, and a friend to the Kennedys. You can print these out and trade them with your friends, unless they’ve also printed them out, in which case you’ll all have a full set already. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Read More