(Stephen G. Rhodes at Vilma Gold)
Paul McCarthy desublimation in Mike Kelley vernacular with Cameron Jamie theatricality of a John Bock or Mika Rottenberg abjection with Jonathan Meese irony, overlain with an overarching Jason Rhodes value production through storytelling (here in the droll PR) to make mess seem rational, making a fairly accurate depiction of culture, though none of it covers this exhibition's stoned Adult Swim aspect, again the absurd placed into the real. We differentiate art from the cultural forms it appropriates by the expectation of the artist’s self-reflexivity + self-consciousness and therein implicitly promising a “content” that culture doesn't. Yet whole swaths of art actively attends its jettisoning of this - or its absurdification - and the comedy it appropriates become more and more self-conscious, and the difference becomes that one is entertainment and the other is boring.
