sus

Well-known member
Sex is core to this is it not though. are these podcasters about how can we reconcile sexual dynamics in the woke sphere, how do we reconcile the fact that we still need to be cool, and how can cultural capital still operate within anti-capital poltiics, we still fancy people more than others, others are more charismatic and attractive, we cant get away from status, hierarchy, how de square this with egalitarianism

Is part of the alt-woke scumbag left drive the acknowledgment of this? that they want to still signal these principles but it conflicts with the reality of their nervous system and crotches twitching at the glamour etc, the benefits of status and exclusivity

yeah definitely, one of the central tensions on the left rn seems to be this question of hierarchy, the nature (and unfairness) of unequal desire, and the podcast/culture writer types are a lightning rod for that conversation in part b/c they embody those same tensions.

As well as a lot of questions—which are in large part settled by having role models a little older than you—around sex, these areas where there are no clear reals, and everything's really liminal right now, people aren't sure what they want sexually, they're in a soup of clashing subcultural norms, media models, Lena Dunham, gossip with friends. OnlyFans/camgirl'ing and the emerging normalization of borderline-sex work.

Key image I think:

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version

Well-known member
every art scene ever has been awash in all the who's fucking who, and they all have dishy memoirs

the difference - and I suppose it's a big difference tbf - is that now the dishy memoirs happy in real time

rather than when all the parties concerned are old enough that their work can be separated from who they did or didn't fuck at the time

and also that people care about reconciling - or appearing to reconcile - their politics with their sexual activities
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sus

Well-known member
What I like about Kaitlin Phillips is I think she's aware of and leaning-into-as-performance/brand the web of cultural associations she dredges up: artist scene who's who, cultural gossip, it-girls. Hence Sevigny, Babitz, and Lieberman as (her) models.

The role & history of gossip & sex & social networks to these movements. Bourdieu:

We are still rewarding people based on publications. It is true now more than ever, if you want a publication, maybe people are paying more attention to sample, but they're very happy to let people do online studies that don't necessarily map well onto behavior, and just run a bunch of them. You get penalized if you want to do careful work. You get penalized if you want to do work on people other than college undergraduates or people who are willing to do online surveys for fifty cents a shot.

Here's Babitz:
In 1963, her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show was curated by Walter Hopps, with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time.[5] The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary images of American modern art”.[3]
 

version

Well-known member
I find these people incredibly draining and that's just from observing them through the internet from time to time. I can imagine having a permanent pained expression on my face were I to actually meet them.
 

sus

Well-known member
and the Biblical

In 1997, Babitz was severely injured when she accidentally dropped a lit match onto a gauze skirt, which ignited the garment and melted her pantyhose beneath it; ultimately the accident caused life-threatening third-degree burns over half her body.
 

sus

Well-known member
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From Phillips's "The Loser Thing," on Rhonda Lieberman, which I think pings against a lot of other stuff about female envy, admiration, and the lack of mentor roles these days, people's sense of being adrift and wanting steering:

Apprenticeship is a constitutionally abject activity: you wannabe the Special Stuff you admire in your hero, while implicitly cutting yourself off from it as long as you wannabe it. Special Stuff is a real imaginary appendage that is produced and circulated as long as everyone believes that other people have it. The fan is, by nature, split off from this organ of real imaginary plenitude; the glamour industry institutionalizes the lack-in-being when it swerves back and attacks you with accusations that you’re not someone else.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
you know far too much about all this gossip, @suspendedreason.
I mean, I think its a milieu that is influential to interesting demographic intersections, ideologically. That is, the dirtbag left, reactionary left, whatever label or set of labels we procure, mark interesting junctions, in terms of ideological development.
 

sus

Well-known member
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David Velasco (late 30s, M): EiC of Artforum, uncontroversially the highest-prestige art magazine in the world. Took over after the Knight Landesman MeToo controversy led previous EiC Michelle Kuo to resign. Also a member of the New York gay mafia. Subject of much gossip—"does he do his job or just go clubbing?" (not a real overheard a composite of many overheards).
He has lived in the same rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in South Williamsburg since 2009, and his boyfriends live in other one-bedroom apartments in the same building, three floors down and one floor down, respectively. When I come over, usually because I’m in trouble, he offers me wine, tequila, poppers, and Xanax, in that order. His only flaw is that he never has cigarettes, having quit 10 years ago. He did, however, recently bum one off Nan Goldin, and explains that he did so to look cool.

He's being interviewed by Sarah Nicole Prickett, who co-authored the Artforum party report, "O Pioneer," mentioned above. She and Kaitlin both write for SSense, an online clothing store who keeps up a top-tier fashion blog for "influencer" reasons—sometimes Kaitlin will wear a really expensive set of shoes for a week and write about how great she feels walking around town in $3500 pair of shoes.
 

sus

Well-known member
Michelle Kuo, a PhD candidate at Harvard and respected critic, was announced as the editor-in-chief in 2010 after Tim Griffin resigned to pursue other work. The magazine followed a similar, sober tone of under its new leadership with roundtable discussions, book and exhibition reviews, and lively hyper-academic discourse.[8] In October 2017, publisher Knight Landesman resigned in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct with nine women including a former employee who filed a lawsuit.[9][10][11][12] Artforum initially backed Landesman, saying the allegations were "unfounded" and suggested that lawsuit was “an attempt to exploit a relationship that she herself worked hard to create and maintain.”[13][14] The magazine's editor Michelle Kuo resigned at the end of the year in response to the publishers' handling of the allegations.[15] Kuo released a statement in Artnews noting, "We need to make the art world a more equitable, just, and safe place for women at all levels. And that can only be achieved when organizations and communities are bound by shared trust, honesty, and accountability."[16] Artforum staff released a statement condemning the way the publishers had handled the allegations.[11][17]

And you can get a full list of consumer products David Velasco endorses on Strategist, cementing his role as New York culture mafia influencer:

 

sus

Well-known member
Anyone remember Cat Marnell's Vice column?

Yeah great mention, she's definitely a big part of the previous wave. Tao Lin/alt-lit adjacent more like it (which Phillips fan-girled for while at Barnard College writing for the Columbia Spectator). "Tiny Furniture," mumblecore producers, etc
 

sus

Well-known member
Brett Easton Ellis is also part of this picture. I know @HMGovt is a fan. Anna Khachiyan of Red Scare stans for him quite a bit IIRC—something about the New York glamour collection—fast living, sex, speed (dissociatives are big too now among the anxious-depressive crowd but white powder's white powder).

I have some faint faint memory of like, David Foster Wallace hanging out with these guys and also that 90s New York chick who did a lot of xanax and wrote about it? What's her name? I don't think he fit in too well

Edit: oh yeah @version beat me to it, I haven't read Glamorama but it's on the list
 
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