JOIN/IGNORE THE TEAMSTERS

You are at the Museum today. The trek was arduous and the lines long, but it was worth it to be kissed on the mouth by modern art. To share intimacies in each other's company, if only for a few hours, it has been of incalculable worth for healing your damaged soul. The embalming of lived experience nourishes itself in the museum-visit and confirms the generalized exoticism of human activity characteristic of commodity society. Despite the labor utilized to build exhibitions, union or not, the hidden asceticism of museum objects mirrors the disfigurement of its patrons.

The lineage of such monuments becomes a fragmented unity of objects constituting a motionless picture of immutable values with an eternally similar meaning, that is, an art history. Indeed, fine art is constantly reminding us that its pieces are merely moments in this autonomous continuum, which can only emerge alongside the cult of originality, of idiosyncrasy, that is, a symptom of the withdrawal from the world into the dominance of the individual and its perceptive capacities. Art offers only the empty promise of a world, and, in its desolate avowal, the mystified wailings of the lonesome individual echoes an entirely social situation; abandoned to the laws of the inward life of preference, taste, and exchange: a saddening relativism of personal opinion. What the museum sells, above all else, is the calm, timeless and contemplative moment of perception swaddled in that sterile and noxious suppository called culture. However, the Museum of Modern Art has unduly overused its bleaching techniques, and now what is required is a remembrance of things past; a festering and vomit-inducing valuation.