Salmagundi (the Summer issue) features an essay by Dubravka
Ugresic, entitled Artists and Murderers, that is right up my alley in terms of
being a scathing and total denunciation of the world of art and culture in the
time of genocidaires and businessmen (the two types often trading positions,
now collecting civilians in camps and massacring them, now setting up chains of
folky fast food restaurants). It seems that in Croatia, where Ugresic hails
from, the writing, artmaking and artcollecting fields, which were once overflowing
with the botched, the bewildered and the bohemian, the eccentric heiress and
the surrealist poet, are now booming
thanks to the participation of the usual masses of scum: politicians, celebrities, and the whole
herd of tv talk show guests who at one point or another stole, killed,
defrauded, scored, screwed, lied, and otherwise made their heap out of an
almost transcendental assholery. You see them in the glam magazines, they roost
in the lists of the 100 most influential. Or, more innocently, they are heirs
of the heap, children of the rich, having traded in Daddy’s very real
semi-automatic for a goldplated squirt gun. Croatia, in other words, sounds
much like the United States. Here’s a couple of grafs:
“All that would be fine.
Why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Each of us can be nourishment for the
mind of a child, in the words of a Croatian amateur poet in celebration of
literature. Murderers and criminals are, however, remarkably ambitious, their
appetite is growing, it is not enough for them that they have published their
own books, have had their own solo and group shows, garnered media attention;
they want acclaim, they want the society which they have bestrewn with their
artworks to bow down before them. Front and center at every theater's opening
night, at every new show, they pontificate on the aesthetic values of each movie,
book, performance. But even that is not enough, they aspire to wield total
control over any realm of art inhabited by their hobby. They are more than
happy to join committees, editorial boards, councils, they become members of
juries, elbow their way onto school curricula, into primers, textbooks,
anthologies. Their hunger is insatiable.”
And this, after Ugrasic
receives an email from a friend explaining at length who were the drowned and
who the saved in the current cultural industry in Croatia, lamenting that she
is the only person in the world who can’t get her book published because –
well, she really is a writer:
“The email from my friend sparked my imagination. Chilled by the
nightmare vision of millions of people worldwide from an array of occupations
clutching their books, and millions more adamant that it was only a matter of
time before they, too, had their book in hand, and inspired by the movie Fifty
Shades of Gray, which I watched along with millions of other earthlings, I went
off to a store that sold practical merchandise. There I purchased the strongest
rope I could find, sturdy iron stakes (as if off to scale a mountain), a drill.
The salespeople jollied me into buying it all and as a bonus they threw in
adhesive strips. The usually snarky salespeople proved unexpectedly solicitous
in my case.
I'd decided to end it all. As far as suicidal practices and
strategies go I may be an amateur, but I am well-read. Recent statistics
suggest that women who commit suicide no longer rely on pills nor do they lean
toward the good-old technique of slitting wrists; instead they tend to embrace
the Bye-bye World! trajectory of the "male" technique of - hanging.
This, then, was why a key item on my shopping list was the rope. Only a few
months later we learned that hanging is not a man's preference; General
Slobodan Praljak, having heard his sentence read out in The Hague, downed a
little flask of poison before the "cameras of the world." One might
say that his theatrical instinct had the upper hand; he did die. On television screens
lingers his grimly frozen head, his gaping mouth, looking more like an immense
fish than a human being.”
This is my kind of stuff, served piping hot. My pantheon leans
towards the critics of the grotesque who through a sheer hatred of vice (and a entropic
decline in the love of virtue) became grotesques themselves: Swift, Leon Bloy,
Karl Krauss, Pasolini.
So read the essay – it is very funny, very sick – and look
around you.