Notes From Nowhere

(Dorothea Brooke made it all the way to the Venice Biennale 2009 earlier this month. However, her report for NFN, a travelogue in eight installments, comes from Paris, the wireless capital of the continent…)

International travel is a rude reacquaintance with the world—each his own suitcase, his travel-sized toiletries, his disposable meal: can we all do this?—and I remember why I am in the academy. I think of John Bayley, the Oxford Don, lost on the train to London, or somewhere, retreating home from fright. Next to me, a baby is inconsolable with tears and rage and I think: I know what you mean. We are so many, and we are a scourge!

My partner bids me to take a cosmic perspective; he proffers weak tea; he absorbs himself in maps. I make dogged sleep in a plastic chair by our gate; 8 hours laid-over in Dublin.

I got to know three billionaires so far (the fourth one does not count; he was not self made). Different cultural backgrounds, different nationalities, different occupations. But very obvious similarities: Always, every minute, unstoppably gravitating toward the shortest path from A to B. Simple tastes. Simple pleasures. Simple relationships. Driven, like race horses with blinders on. Bullshit detectors like a whole forest of radar towers. In my experience, this is an entirely different breed compared to business people who just happened to gobble up a couple of millions at some point.

So I showed Chelsea to a billionaire this past Friday. Remember a couple of months ago, when the economic downturn became obvious, and some in the art world thought, great, now the galleries have a chance to be innovative? Since they know they are not going to sell anything anyway for some time, so what the hell?

By the end of our little tour, after the umpteenth “show” selling out to, well, I don’t know, tourists maybe, with images ranging from Düsseldorf stereotypes, to well-worn depictions of “consumerism,” to contemporary American landscape kitsch, to (seriously) a kind of street-sale Liberty Statue series, my visitor stepped into the waiting car and said: “These people would be better off selling flower pots.”

There are exceptions on planet Chelsea. I still loved the verdict, though, and who offered it.

Update: A brave post that looks at Chelsea from the other end, here.

In the eternal words of Mia Wallace, this image of an old mattress, leaning against a tree near 107th Street, contains “a little more information than we needed to know.” However, the low res web version easily got the coveted MPAA G-rating, so we proudly present it here.