There’s no reason why the art gallery as we know it, a 19th century invention, should last forever. But there’s also no sign of an alternative on the horizon. As with other small New York businesses that’ve been closed since mid-March, it’s not clear how many galleries will be able to hold out long enough to reopen. (When I began writing this, galleries had begun to reopen in Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere with proper protection, but no clear date for reopening had been set for those in New York; now the latter have started reopening, still mostly, it seems, by appointment.) For now, artists depend on galleries, if not for subsistence—few have ever been able to live entirely from the sale of their work—then to make their work known, to cultivate a public for it.
The pandemic has not put an end to all gallery activity, though: Galleries are going gangbusters trying to keep their constituencies involved online. My inbox has never been more full of frantic appeals for attention. Galleries that used to send out announcements a couple of times a month now seem to reach out on a daily basis, asking me to check out their highlighted work of the day, to peruse their “online viewing rooms,” or to join the audience for a virtual studio visit with one of their quarantined artists. I’m having none of it. I’ll be happy to bide my time and wait until I can safely see real things in real three-dimensional space.
And maybe, as we use this time to rethink many of the other systems that have seemed so immutable, so natural, so much a part of the way things just are, we can reflect on why we thought we needed all those heroes in the first place, or how they were foisted on us. Eventually, we’ll go back to the movies, but maybe we’ll be less docile, less obedient, when we do. I’m not necessarily saying that we should abolish the Avengers, or defund the DC universe, but fantasies of power are connected to the actual forms that power takes. What feels like a loss in this superhero-free summer might be liberation.
There’s a bit in “Wayne’s World” that I think about all the time. Wayne (Mike Myers), the host of a public access show with a cult following, is grandstanding about the artistic integrity of his program when the scene spontaneously combusts into a surrealist orgy of product placement. Wayne slickly presents a Pizza Hut box, crunches a Dorito, takes a refreshing swig of Pepsi. The scene culminates with Garth (Dana Carvey), Wayne’s introverted sidekick, languidly reclining in head-to-toe Reebok gear. “It’s like people only do things because they get paid,” Garth says. “And that’s just really sad.”
I keep that Garth moment handy, in GIF form, to deploy whenever I recognize that ambivalent impulse in myself and others, which is all of the time. When I first watched “Wayne’s World” as a little kid, I identified with Garth’s shy, proud demeanor. Like Garth, I was muted by social anxiety, hypersensitive to attention and frustrated at being misunderstood; my favorite part of the movie was watching Garth’s sheepish exterior crack into boiling rage. But over the years, I have been drawn to the character on a more existential level. He has become a kind of beacon — a guide to being a real person in a branded world.
In Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, Jenny Kleeman examines the innovations that promise to change the way we love, eat, reproduce and die in the future. “What you are about to read is not science fiction,” she warns in her preface. “We are on the brink of an age when technology will redefine … the fundamental elements of our existence.” First on her list of apocalyptic developments is the production of AI-enabled, animatronic sexbots, which, depending on your viewpoint, provide warmth and comfort to socially isolated men or allow misogynist incels to live out their rape fantasies. Her research takes her to Abyss Creations, the throbbing heart of the industry where hyperrealistic dolls are created complete with custom-made hair, nipples and vaginal inserts.
When at last
the last fires burnt
out upon the prairie,
trains could be