Last week the New York Times dance critic wrote an article with a legitimate title: “Nakedness in Dance”.
He starts like any typical article by an art critic, discusses the history of dance, mentions the old classics “Hair” “Oh Calcutta”, etc. And then he says:
Yes, that’s right—stick a dildo up your butt, add a bit for the foot fetishists in the audience, and proudly call it a “dance moment”.
It happened in Manhattan, so it has to be art , right?
Fuck you, Mr. Avant Garde True Believer in High Culture. Get the fuck out of New York ,and leave behind your social clique of elite snobs. Go learn something about REAL American culture.
Go to a country music show in Nashville. Go to a Baptist church in Little Rock, Arkansas. Go to a Nascar race. Go to a high school basketball game in Indiana. Go watch the Super Bowl. Go to frickin’ Las Vegas, or Hollywood .
Or, since you are a True Guardian of High Culture, and can’t stoop to associating with the peasantry…Go to any city in the country and hear their philharmonic orchestra. Go to the theater in Indianapolis where this week there is a performance of Mexican ballet. Go the theater in Seattle where they’re performing the Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams .
Go fucking anywhere, do fucking anything…
But for Og’s sake, do it where they don’t shove dildos up their asses on stage and proudly call it art, and print it in the cultural section of the newspaper.
Fuck NASCAR, fuck Nashville, fuck the Southern Baptist Convention, fuck the Super Bowl, fuck Vegas, fuck Hollywood, and fuck New York and dildos up the ass as modern dance.
There, now. What’s left? I’m not much on Mexican ballet, and I think most symphony orchestras are culturally moribund. Anyone for some nice classic jazz?
fine by me…as long as the musicians don’t use didoes on stage. But then the NY Times wont cover it. Because if it didnt happen at the Queer Festival in New York, it ain’t culture
that’s my whole point—that fact that he included it at all means that he thinks that the basic idea is okay, it’s just that this specific interpretation wasn’t quite as effective as the artists intended.
It’s still bullshit, and the expert on “culture” is incapable of saying so.Any redneck at a nascar race, or any jazz enthusiast, could set him straight.
I thought the OP was doing a performance pit after I read the article, but whatever. It’s a piece about nudity in experimental dance and an example that fails. Your rant, sir, is ridiculous.
I might consider going to a NASCAR race or a Baptist church in Little Rock if the peasantry there jammed dildos in their ringpieces for ten minutes. But I’m just a culture-saturated Manhattanite, so what do I know?
Seems sort of bizarre to call someone an art snob and then say what they think is art really isn’t. Doesn’t that make the OP the art-snob?
Anyhoo, seems silly to say nude dance isn’t “real art”. It pretty obviously is. The example given in the OP isn’t good art (which was the NYT’s point in bringing it up), but bad art is still art.
