We’ve just observed Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and the sins and transgressions of the past year have been more or less absolved. Which may be just as well, since another major guilt-trip may loom on the horizon: ‘If Barack Obama doesn’t become the next president of the United States, I’m going to blame the Jews.’ Or so threatens Sarah Silverman, the aggressively sardonic and deadpan comedian (_Jesus is Magic_, The Aristocrats), in her new web video The Great Schlep.
Noting that Florida is yet again going to be a pivotal swing state in the upcoming election, Silverman made the video with the help of the political action committee The Jewish Council for Education and Research to urge young Gen-X and Y Jews to head down to the Sunshine State and badger, bully and coerce their retired grandparents to let go of their latent fears and prejudices and vote Obama in November. ‘Yes, OK, Barack…Hussein…Obama: it’s a super fucking shitty name. But you’d think someone named “Manischewitz Gooberman” might understand that,’ explains faux-exasperated Silverman regarding why normally staunchly Democratic nanas and zaides might believe all the right-wing blogosphere rumors about Obama being a Manchurian Candidate-like closet Muslim bent on the destruction of the state of Israel.
I first came across The Great Schlep while in Tel Aviv for the opening of Art TLV, where it started to get a lot of play, and in the two weeks since it’s release it has been watched by over 7 million viewers in the US, where it is circulating virally and is the latest instance of a brand of confident, informed, acerbic and focused satire that is fast becoming a significant insurgency tool against the Republican’s Rove-style disinformation machine. A tool that is actually having a measurable effect. (After Tina Fey nimbly lacerated Sarah Palin with her pitch-perfect impersonations of the VP nominee – using her own incoherent interview and debate transcripts as fodder – Palin’s solidly positive poll numbers immediately began to drop in inverse proportion to the rising TV viewership of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Even Palin acknowledged during a campaign rally in Florida late last week that she is ‘providing job security for Tina Fey’ in an odd feedback loop between the parodist and the parodied.) All this stands in stark contrast to the lonely job description of the political satirist just a few years ago (think of Stephen Colbert’s bravely inspired roasting of President Bush at the White House press correspondents dinner in 2006 at the height of W’s mass popularity and the media’s timid self-censorship and how radical and nearly suicidal his speech then seemed).
Now former SNL comedian Al Franken is running a serious campaign for US Senate in a close race against the incumbent Republican senator in Minnesota, and it has become a familiar fact that a disproportionate and rising number of 20 and 30-something Americans get their news from such news parodies as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, not the major networks. Meanwhile, as Silverman assures her bubbe, using the kinds of carrots and sticks that only a grandkid can wield, Obama’s “brisket is beyond…it’s beyond”. If that doesn’t sway the election, what will?
A recent episode of the television show Mad Men – a brilliant series about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s – featured a work of contemporary art as its surprising symbolic centrepiece. In this episode, the boss of the ad agency, the eccentric Mr. Cooper (who always makes employees remove their shoes before entering his office) is rumoured to be calling his executives to his office, one-by-one, for a personal meeting. His workers are convinced that the meetings are a cover-up – that they’re actually being tested on their reactions to Mr. Cooper’s new acquisition, a painting that cost him 10,000 dollars. The executives decide to break into his office after hours, to get a head start on formulating their opinions about the new ‘picture’. Upon opening up the door, they find a red and orange Mark Rothko hanging on the wall. ‘Hmph. Smudgy squares’, declares the secretary. One of the executives, the head of the television department, who is first-up for his personal meeting with Mr. Cooper, decides there are two possibilities: ‘Either Cooper loves it, so you have to love it, like in an emperor’s new clothes situation, or he thinks it’s a joke and you’ll look like a fool if you pretend to dig it.’ None of them, not even the ‘creatives’ or the art department, can come up with a meaningful interpretation of such a modern work of art. When the head of TV is finally called in to see Mr. Cooper, he admits, ‘Sir, I know nothing about art.’ To which Mr. Cooper divulges his secret: ‘People buy things to realize their aspirations – it’s the foundation of our business.’ And then, before dismissing the topic, he adds with a grin, ‘But between you and me and the lamppost, that thing should double in value by next Christmas.’
Either nothing has much has changed about American’s perceptions toward art since 1961, or the episode is a reflection of how we in the US view contemporary art today, seen through the lens of our past. Namely, we understand art primarily for its financial value. A recent cover story in Time (the first time, probably since Andy Warhol, that the magazine featured a contemporary artist on its cover) pictured Damien Hirst beside the headline ‘Bad Boy Makes Good’. Underneath it, the subtitle gushed, ‘Thanks to an unprecedented auction, the merrily morbid British artist Damien Hirst is about to land the biggest payday in the history of art.’ So ‘making good’, in this case, doesn’t mean making good art, it means earning lots of money. The article, which focuses mainly on Hirst’s prices and his impoverished background (calling him a ‘cash cow’), is illustrated with several images of Hirst’s work: their titles are printed in black, while their ‘Estimated Prices’ are printed even larger, in siren red. The article presents his artwork in the only terms it assumes its readers will understand: what makes him worthy of inclusion in this magazine is not the quality of his artworks, but the prices they can fetch.
