The Gutter Art Critic

While we may have been wrong and unnecessarily hopeful about Bernie Sanders the presidential candidate, there is perhaps one ‘good’ outcome from the fiasco that has become the Sanders presidential campaign, The Myth of Bernie . Long story short, the myth suggests that it is better to be a failed presidential candidate (with its mythical and fantasmatic core preserved) than a failed president. The unfulfilled potential of the candidate cannot be taken in the same light as the unfulfilled promises of an acting president. We may now forever sit and debate ‘what would’ve been’ had Sanders won. The mythmaking process was kicked off properly in 2016 on the heels of the Democratic National Convention when Bernie Sanders was effectively pushed out by the Democratic party to make way for Hillary Clinton (herself a mythologized figure inside the Clinton supporter camp). The recent events saw a replay of 2016, though the Sanders campaign was, from the very beginning, already much weaker than it

I can’t stand the word archive anymore.   Every curator is an artist and every artist is a wannabe curator.   The tables have flipped almost perfectly against the artist in every imaginable way when it comes to vanguardism and edginess.   No longer, it seems, does the average artist work with any complex issues, though they may appear that way at first. The artist of today is content with towing the line of populist sentiment, pop and pseudo-philosophy, not even commenting on these issues as much as simply cleverly regurgitating what everyone already knows.   The archive is just one of these recent developments that the artworld better soon forget because it is fucking up a whole generation of artists that could have otherwise been helpful in other lines of work, like the food and service industry.    The ridiculousness of the archive is that as a term it has the right tone and desirability for the elite.   It reeks of academicism, and importance. But this importance is also ve

Repeating History: A Nostalgic Perspective  A typical critique of nostalgia has the same overtone of a cliché as does the sentence ‘when one does not know his history, one is destined to repeat it.’ This sentence seems as true as it is patently false in the same way that nostalgia, still a dirty word in our so called post-modern culture, seems to be a word that describes a true emotion, longing, but at the same time keeps its distance by suggesting itself to be a delusion, a sentimental longing for a simple past, a home. That history repeats itself because we are not aware of it is a simplification, a sounding board for generations that grew up with false wisdom masquerading as studied fact. What if it is precisely the opposite that is true? What if it is because we know our history that we repeat it again and again? The nostalgic knows this and therefore she yearns for a time when this was not the case, which is of course never. This case in point was well put in the short mini-s