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    Mariana Mtz
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    Primer capitulo del libro: Pirates and Farmers, escrito por Dave Kickey.

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    Primer capitulo del libro: Pirates and Farmers, escrito por Dave Kickey.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    14 views12 pages

    Pirates and Farmers

    Uploaded by

    Mariana Mtz
    Primer capitulo del libro: Pirates and Farmers, escrito por Dave Kickey.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 12
    PIRATES AND PARMERS DAVE HICKEY Ridinghouse Introduction On Taste HERE are always absolutes. There are pirates and there are farmers. We are all one or the other, but even these genetic empires are scattered with protean archipelagos of taste. We want what we want, but like obsessive serial killers, we want it exactly the way we want it. We want the corpse wearing Mama’s lipstick, so, along with aroma, taste is the oldest most precedent sense. Our lizard brains were tasting and smelling things long before we started worshipping them. So I should start with Andy Warhol, because his first masterpieces articulate the distinction between taste and desire. In Warhol's radical democracy, the vitrine of high culture is a prison. There are desires endemic to the species that hold us together; there are shifting local tastes and traditions that keep us apart, and there are artists like Warhol whose ecumenical, global fame, sans vitrine, can unite the two. Warhol began with his soup-can paintings and his “Flavored Marilyns”—trademark desires produced in individual flavors to suit your taste. Everyone desires Campbell's Soup. It’s the best stuff. Everybody desires Marilyn Monroe. She’s the most desirable woman. But we all have our personal kinks, so Andy painted fifty-two Campbell soup- can paintings, each slightly different in its configuration and one n painting for every flavor of soup: Cheese, Mushroom, Tomato, Clam Chowder, Bean and Bacon, etc. He painted about a dozen Flavored Marilyns—or Lifesaver Marilyns, as they were called at the Factory, since the candy provided the colors. All the Marilyns are identical in these paintings, but the backgrounds come in lime, orange, lemon, strawberry, pineapple, and licorice, to suit your taste while fulfilling your desires. John Baldessari and I saw Andy’s theory confirmed ata Warhol survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art. We were standing in a room hung with five large Electric Chair paintings ina variety of monochromes. A group of Park Avenue matrons strolled in, and without hesitation one of them said: “I like the blue one,” and I could see her living room and imagine her childhood, the blue haze in her heart, and the grim pleasure she took in social executions. Standing there, I wondered, like Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” because, as likely as not, that is all there is—not that there’s anything wrong with that-My positionis that ideology is fashion anyway, and for the last two centuries most ve Tee : Jocal, (Imagine Freud practicing in Rio.) Over the years, [have seen fistfights erupt in casino lounges over the relative quality of the whores at Soi Cowboy in Bangkok and the De Wallen whores in Amsterdam. I have seen skirmishes over the relative virtues of pickled herring and Japanese breakfast and over the relative manliness of fox hunting and baccarat. Duels have been fought over the silliness or sublimity of kilts, lederhosen, Mormon prairie 12 ON TASTE dresses, and the teased silver hairdos of Southern dowagers. James Madison actually argued for this distinction between taste and desire in the Tenth Federalist Paper. Since small republics are vulnerable to virulent faction, Madison suggested that this tendency would be mitigated in a large republic composed of multiple public proclivities, products, needs, climates, populations, and languages—multiple tastes but one _

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