If I told you you were beautiful, would you date me on the regular?

2008.Mar.21. Friday - by The Sean Bailey

In anticipation of Nick Weist’s upcoming curatorial art opening/dance party spectacular, If I told you you were beautiful, would you date me on the regular?, The Sean Bailey (ARCH DL IV) sat down with him (remotely) to discuss his views on art, JT, and the media public.

So tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a kid from Brooklyn that works at Creative Time. I put shows together and I do some writing on the side. I don’t like the word “curator” yet, maybe because I haven’t grown into it, but also because in my projects I try to wiggle around the structure of the curatorial process.

Can you give some examples?

In our new show on Why + Wherefore, my two partners and I are playing a game of “curatorial telephone”, where each of us reacts to works selected by the others one at a time. The show grows in real time, so every three days or so a new piece is added. You can see the show at whyandwherefore.com.

In my current project, If I told you you were beautiful would you date me on the regular? the “show” is actually a one-night-only opening/event with 3 DJs and 50 bottles of Svedka. So the whole event, rather than just the artwork, as in more traditional shows, will engage with the primary idea of the audience becoming agents within the field of culture and media.

What was the impetus behind the theme of cultural repurposing?

I felt that it was the right time to do a project like this; beyond the usual amount of attention people are giving media (and that in itself is significant), the public is now surrendering their whole lives to it!

I’m thinking not just of reality shows, but also that game show, Moment of Truth, where contestants reveal their darkest secrets while hooked up to a polygraph machine, or the America’s Next ____ shows where the field is open for the public to judge itself through participants that have been temporarily elevated to the status of pop icons.

It’s a complex flattening of roles that used to be very strictly defined: the delineation between media outlets and media consumers is over, and only the consumers have lost ground. The producers of culture have become more pervasive in daily life while also strip-mining the public for its very content!

My show is about artists reclaiming some territory from media. They take what they need, or take voraciously all that they want, and make something new from it, something that lives outside of the sphere of media and could never be accepted back into it.

In your last reply you touched on some of the ways that the dissemination, production, and consumption of media has changed substantially over a very short time. Have artist’s responses to the media changed just as drastically, or is it merely the themes that have changed to remain relevant to contemporary audiences?

I would definitely say that the way artists, and especially younger artists, are responding to media is changing. I’m thinking of Kalup Linzy or Ryan Trecartin—both of whom make their own forms of media that mirror (in an outsized, thoughtful, and provocative way) the way media has become an all-consuming, omnipresent force.

If I told you you were beautiful is less about engaging with media, or interrogating the structure of pop culture and interceding or subverting it, than about crafting a space where artists (and attendees at the event) have a degree of agency that a quiescent public has ceded. In other words, the works do not comment on culture at all, perhaps outside of the way in which the act of making something is une petite révolution in and of itself.

Is the flattening of the media-scape (audience and product) and the media’s general pervasiveness a pressing ethical dilemma, or are you celebratory of it?

I would say that this show is definitely celebratory. I chose Justin Timberlake as the central focus of the show because outside of the relevancy of the message behind his song “My Love” (which asks how little he would have to do in order for you to surrender yourself to him completely). He is a figure that I and many other highly critical people are ambivalent about. I know that he’s a godhead of the most disturbing religion out there–bubble gum pop–but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to dance to his music.

The flattening you mentioned is incorporated into this project by the 3 DJs I’ve invited to curate a selection of music related to the song. One will only play songs by T.I. and Timbaland, the two other musicians that collaborated on “My Love”. One is playing a range of music based on Timberlake’s personal connections: Christina Aguilera, whom he starred with in the Mickey Mouse Club; Britney Spears, whom he dated.

I wanted to include this music because media should be lauded as the source of these artists’ material, while bearing in mind that most retain a critical distance from it. A great example of this kind of thinking is the limited edition artwork by Scott Hug that I co-produced for the show. It’s a poster, like the kind you can buy at Walmart (a precise replica of one, anyhow), showing Timberlake in his Nsync days, under a waterfall. Scott has pastiched Timberlake’s signature onto the image, along with some other text. It really is a fan-made fan poster, but functions as a collage. Signed and numbered posters can be purchased for $20.

So, just to refresh my memory, Artwork from some amazing young talent, Justin Timberlake, and 50 bottles of Svedka!?