Has anybody noticed how basketball players dress like 16th-century Baltic women.
Dean Kissick
@deankissick
Dean Kissick’s Tweets
Prince Harry’s melancholy is tragic because it speaks to the abjection of the entire Millennial project; from stoner Nazi cosplay, to mass murderer with Oedipal complex, to anti-racism campaigner, failed podcaster, self-pitying writer of autofictions with boring sans-serif fonts.
New LOEWE collection inspired by Pontormo’s The Deposition from the Cross (1528) is amazing.
My friend told me he used to date a Japanese pop star, she had millions of dollars, and had experienced an epiphany while watching Talladega Nights. She spoke often of how everything changed after seeing Talladega Nights, he told me. I asked how and he said he didn’t know.
This film is about a drunken communist sea captain who loses control of his yacht in a storm.
On a desert island, the cleaning lady takes charge: she anoints herself dictator, takes a male model sex slave, and brutally murders a subject with a rock.
What is the message exactly?
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“What I was holding were the pieces of a shattered Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture, an early red one. It was wonderful to see an icon of art world commercialism and valorized stupidity shattered… to see the hollow interior of a work of willful superficiality.”
Ben Lerner, 10:04
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Breaking News: A woman accidentally knocked over a balloon dog sculpture by Jeff Koons at an art fair in Miami, causing the $42,000 artwork to shatter, witnesses said. nyti.ms/3Ixd4JN
What Bladee told me in Joe & the Juice:
“Even if you don’t believe in god or something, everyone is born with a sense of beauty and everyone knows this concept. … I feel like it’s some deep system that is embedded in humanity and everyone is striving for beauty in life.”
The contemporary obsession with suffixes (-core, -pilled, -maxing, -mode, -adjacent) signifies a breakdown in descriptive language, a CRISIS of adjectives. twitter.com/skooookum/stat
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This is my last column. I’m eternally thankful to everyone that has read me over the past six years; and this has been a very unusual time of our lives.
spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/do
I don’t believe that, as a society, we should act so surprised that a man who could have sex with anybody he wanted should choose to have sex with beautiful young models.
This is one of the strange paradoxes of media today: we’re told every morning that life is miserable and ugly, which it’s not, and also that culture is high-quality and life-affirming, which is plainly horseshit. It’s breathtakingly diabolical.
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Has there ever been such a relentlessly positive music journalism culture? Everything's like, 'an epic story of love, loss and self-acceptance told through the prism of...' Where's all the bad reviews and calling Keane 'bedwetters'? Or do you have to have done something terrible?
Sociopaths are cool but they don’t really hang out together. It’s hard to find a large friend group of only sociopaths.
In the next few years there’s going to be a sweeping assault on reality, and meaning (i.e. lots of fake images, videos, recordings and texts that are also meaningless, that serve no agenda), and it’s going to be very deranged and disorientating, but also exciting.
This must be destroyed. twitter.com/luso_brendan/s
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Beeple’s current bid is $9.75 million on Christie’s, breaking his own record and setting a new high for any Millennial artist, dead or alive. Auction runs for 2 more days.
Here’s a recent piece of his, “Joetopia” (2020):
Conservatives outraged with fashion and art, it’s like the Nineties all over again. It’s a new day in America! twitter.com/SebGorka/statu
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The dominant art form of the last five years has been performance. As in, everyone’s performing a role. And the dominant medium is personality/ identity/ body.
The “Dimes Square” scene isn’t about making art, it’s about making a name for yourself; whether you’re a part of it, or writing and posting about it. Everyone is a character. The persona is the message.
The crime of most NFTs is that they’re grotesquely ugly and reflect and foster an ugly and childish world. A world of cartoons and streetwear, a world without beauty.
Whether or not they’re a grand Neo-Nazi conspiracy, or accelerate climate change etc., seems besides the point. twitter.com/ryder_ripps/st
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There’s something about the Vessel that just makes people want to kill themselves.
I doubt this was Heatherwick’s intention, but that’s what he’s given us. Really I don’t think anyone’s ever built an object with such properties before.
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Replying to @geraldbullvevo
I watched a video and actually think it looks quite nice but it's definitely shaped like some kind of fucked up occult sigil designed to entrap souls
Freud’s student Wilhelm Reich believed political extremism was driven by unexpressed sexual energy. And it was under Reich’s influence that William Steig dreamt up Shrek: “an embodiment of his ideal type—a figure unswayed by authority and utterly at ease with his own effluvia.”
I like the form of this. The meter and tone. The rings and markings on her face (the symbology). Incredible delivery of the closing line. It feels very contemporary, as few things do.
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This afternoon I saw Gigi Hadid walking around without a face. Like an assassin. Like an old Japanese ghost. Like a hot mom fighting in a Tekken tournament. And this filled me with a tremendous feeling of optimism.
I like what Jon Rafman is making with the AI, this New American Gothic aesthetic:
The 2010s never happened. You live in Berlin and make sculptures of ... You listen to Yeasayer. You listen to Deerhunter. No Age. Everybody’s hip and there’s no such thing as alternative culture. Things will always be like this. Nothing’s ever going to change.
Last night I saw that guy who rolls himself up in a carpet at the bar and invites strangers to walk on him, and on his break he came over and said,
“I’m having more fun now than when I was in the carpet.”
All because we made an image of a Pope that dripped too hard.
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BREAKING: A petition is circulating to PAUSE all major AI developments.
e.g. No more ChatGPT upgrades & many others.
Signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Stability AI CEO & 1000s of other tech leaders.
Here's the breakdown: 
This is the central issue in art today, this is what’s been fought over:
“Meaning cannot be sutured onto a work by simple facts such as the artist’s biography or identity, because such things have no inherent tie to the quality of the work.”
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Editorial update: Why Does The Whitney Biennial Suck So Much? 19933.biz/whitneybiennia
Did Jesus surround himself with geniuses, with intellectuals, with scholars?
No, my child, Jesus surrounded himself with fucking morons and so should you.
Replying to
Choosing—for your performance at Glastonbury, the biggest show of your career—to complain about “The Adam Friedland Show Podcast” over early KoRn, is a fine example of how the discourse has overwhelmed the culture. The discourse is the culture. There’s little else left.
Today’s New Aesthetic is one of lifelessness and void.
It’s “post-death” culture (per Mónica Belevan ).
Art and pop stripped of all vigor, fertility, joy and sensuality.
Disposable consumer experiences that wash right over you like an Ambien.
The “Vibe Shift” might be understood as an effort to get a culture that has stalled back moving again. If, as suggested in The CUT, that somehow entails a return to early-2000s hipster aesthetics (which were already nostalgic at the time), it’s going to be a doomed project.
When I go to the grocery store I don’t bring a list. I just throw myself into a twirling space of temptation and desire.
The Work of Art in the Age of Algorithmic Stupidity
There’s a Balenciaga show on the New York Stock Exchange floor because the attention economy is the economy.
They killed him on Dasha’s birthday.
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Jean-Luc Brunel, notorious rapist and modeling agent who was in Epstein’s inner circle, found hanging dead in his cell in Paris
cnn.com/2022/02/19/eur
We have forgotten how to imagine a different world.
We must rise against OkCupid. Against the whole subway advertising industrial complex.
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It’s good that VICE and other clickbait media sellouts are failing. It’s good if the late-night shows never return. Mediocre consensus-building culture deserves to fail.
It’s also good that we have AI. Imaginative, creative minds should not be afraid of technological progress.
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Between the massive media layoffs, the looming bankruptcy of Vice, the studios forcing the writers into a strike & the rise of A.I. there's been a grotesque devaluation of imagination & creativity – during a time where it feels like people are more desperate for it than ever.
Heaven by Marc Jacobs Spring 2023 campaign starring Tara Reid and I.
Art is very weird now: the most expensive artist under 68 is hardly an artist. The new stars of the auctions are even worse. The most valuable painting ever is missing, and is a forgery. The most important survey exhibition turned against art, and was clearly a bloody disaster.
My local café has a “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” sticker on the espresso machine.
Life today is not so different from the Middle Ages. We have no understanding of the cosmos. We lie awake in our beds and dream of things we’ll never have. Also I wish to go to Ghent to see the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb but I’m not allowed to because of the Plague.
Renoir painting of a crowd of reactionary underwear models attending a ball outside Dimes Deli in the summer of 1876.
The Desire Crisis: from ’90s Sex-and-Shopping to ’20s Selfies-and-Scrolling Society
You must give the world something nobody’s asking for. Something that nobody wants.
Yesterday I lost a great deal of money and, in a state of manic anxiety and remorse, went to Sotheby’s to drink champagne and see friends’ works sold for $350,000, $380,000, $900,000. My first auction. I think I understand painting, and the futility of criticism, far better now.
The main disagreement in culture today is whether it should revolve around identity or personality.
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Trevor Noah is leaving "The Daily Show."
James Corden will depart "The Late Late Show."
TBS canceled "Full Frontal With Samantha Bee."
"The Tonight Show" could begin earlier.
The big question in TV now: What's the future of the late-night talk show? nyti.ms/3MgxVBo
All the glamorous fashion editors I used to work with have now retrained as shamans or psychoanalysts.
Okay I’ll take responsibility. Here’s my plan:
Stop hiring Millennial architects, graphic designers, strategists etc.
Abolish decks. Make moodboards illegal. No more collaboration. Banish “creatives” and “creative directors” to the woods.
We’ll soon return to the line of beauty.
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Whose responsibility is it to lead us out of these aesthetics, and how do they plan to accomplish it? nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-i
My 4,000 words on Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal.”
In the Mark Fisher interview with Burial, Burial says,
“Sometimes maybe you see ghosts on the underground with an empty Costcutters plastic bag, nowhere to go. They are smaller, about 70% smaller than a normal person, smaller than they were in life.”
Heard about a lot of problems in the club. Everyone’s struggling with going out every night. There are too many parties, too many drinks. And hot girls in open relationships are having a hard time on account of men becoming pussies. No one will come up and talk to them.
Advertising was better when it was just corporate lies, and pornography, rather than deranged brand sentience, personal journeys, meaningless political propaganda.
This is what they’re building in the faraway desert oasis of NEOM, twitter.com/lameypilled/st
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“I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives,
And now it’s happening in mine.” t.co/dTymwtQZsM
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Some dude’s brought a copy of Paglia’s “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson” to the gym.
Just a year ago Mr. Freeman and I were two lowly art gossip columnists: the dregs of a broken society. One evening we went to Lucien to drown our sorrows …
Now Nate is married, the toast of the town, carousing upstate in Fitzgeraldian splendor, and I’m some fucked up meme.
This fall I’ll be joining MoMA to head up the new art-related streaming channel with a budget of, I don’t know, $60 million.
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Some $70 million of art from MoMA, including masterpieces by Picasso, Renoir and Rodin, will be sold this fall to fund the museum's new push into digital on.wsj.com/3S4DXGG
“You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart.”
Houellebecq
Because he was a CIA asset;
may have been painting a pagan ritual space in the old Four Seasons dining room;
and when he killed himself in his 69th St studio his blood pooled to the exact dimensions of one of his canvases, turning him into one of his paintings.
They have AURA.
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Someone explain to me why Mark Rothko paintings are good. Please help me. These things are definitionally childish, what am I missing???
My friend slept with a guy recently. He fucked her but wouldn’t come. She asked why and he told her,
“Okay, I have a disclaimer: I don’t come on the first date.”
They had a nap. Later he woke up and masturbated, but wouldn’t come. He said this was out of respect, and allyship.
We’re trapped in the world Fredric Jameson foretold, “a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.”
But I know there are ways out.
Today we celebrate the first anniversary of the Vibe Shift, June 1–5, 2021.
Proust went to see View of Delft for a second time a hundred years ago (May 1921) and afterwards never left his home again. Its beauty left him dizzy. He died a year later; the night before he stayed up late dictating lines like, “There is a Chinese patience in Vermeer’s craft.” t.co/Oqslo24X7J
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Manet, as he lay dying in Paris, kept painting the bouquets brought to him on his deathbed, striving, until the very end, to reach a more truthful representation.
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This afternoon in TriBeCa we passed an attractive young lady in cool-weather athleisure striding confidently across the crosswalk reading the book “Why Men Love BITCHES.”
One shouldn’t “like” anything on here, and certainly never reply, for as Jacques Derrida says, every time you reveal a desire, you condemn it at the same time to death.
Cool new galleries are opening this weekend: Ramiken Chinatown tonight, Theta tomorrow. Lomex just moved to TriBeCa too. There’s a bar with no name, sign or windows opening soon. Plans for a new club (weed, dancing, public sex). I heard about a new BAKERY. It’s a new era.
My favorite take on why art, fashion, culture have grown senescent and mediocre:
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Replying to @deankissick
Social problems there will always be, but taboo is what operates at deeper level of the psyche & with the disappearance of the taboo coincides the disappearance of the most psychologically complex, tormented & impassioned art. Sans taboo art becomes formulaic, a la late paganism.
I gather everyone in the New York media and art worlds has caught Omicron. Well I haven’t, because I live responsibly.
Happy to be suing L’OFFICIEL on this, their 100th anniversary year. Thank you New York City, National Writers Union, Mayor Bill de Blasio, for helping us sue those crooks, those démodé onion-pinching bobo voleurs, at L’OFFICIEL.
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For a century, L'OFFICIEL has chronicled art as a lifestyle #FASHION #ART #PARIS Celebrate 100 years of zeitgeist-capturing moments with #LOFFICIEL100: l8r.it/E8qX
I do find the TikTok dance interesting because it’s not really dance, it’s something else. It’s like a weird form of vaguely erotic mime. Really TikTok dances and NFTs are the only new artistic mediums of the last decade.
My secondhand copy of Mark Fisher’s “Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures” came with 16 free Hello Fresh dinners, $100 Naked Wines voucher, and $110 off Blue Apron meal kits.
EXCUSE ME WHAT?!!?!
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Quirked-up white boys goated on the sauce… tradcath pro-ana big-tiddy nrx gfs… Downtown culture and its online iteration teem with word-salad signifiers and shibboleths. It’s exhausting and annoying. Should anyone care?
thebaffler.com/latest/escape-
I really believe the internet is mankind’s greatest creation. It is the Tower of Babel. It’s the closest we’ve come yet to building god.
What’s most remarkable about Rothko is not that his artworks frequently cause viewers to collapse, to break down in tears (historically many artworks have done this)—
but that no other artist after him has this effect on their audience. He was the last one.
The list from the opening party. This is a photo of a photo of the list. I don’t know who wrote the list, other than that they’re an artist. You can tell this was written by an artist.
But I agree that big ambitious installation art has fallen from favor. Never see it anymore.
Replying to
Nostalgia looks 20 years back. So now we’re nostalgic for the 2000s, a decade in which some (like Mark Fisher) believe new ideas stopped appearing in culture.
Now we’ll find out:
What happens when we’re nostalgic for a decade that was already nostalgic, already haunted?
Idol bondage fantasies … Houellebecq sex tape … Hunter Biden crack orgy … Picasso redemption arc … the end of the sexual recession … the Dare ephebophile mania … it seems we had to spend eight years restoring all the old taboos just so that we could break them again.
Pop culture is blob culture. It’s made by the amorphous blob; by dozens of young creatives, and no one’s really trying, no one cares. And so, just as the old Dutch painter sneaks his own likeness into the crowd, it’s come to resemble its maker, the blob:
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