Monday, April 26, 2010

Who Killed Bambi?

The ability to be absurdly timely on the internet creates these media cluster-fucks where as news breaks, everyone covers whatever is going on & the thing sweeps through the circuits, like baseball fans doing "The Wave". Malcolm McLaren dying is just another one of these media waves that i had no interest in piling on top of. I also believe that it takes a bit of time to gather one's wits about them & actually assess these sorts of things.

I hadn't become reobsessed with Andy Warhol before McLaren had died either, so the picture was incomplete. McLaren & Warhol are very similar sorts of people, people with the Midas touch, people that create broader value out of things that might be otherwise overlooked, ignored & undervalued. Curators of humanity! In the Art world, there is alot of emphasis on "creation" & things being "new", but when you take a look at how many people are creating all of this new stuff, how much of all this stuff is just piling up in hidden areas, it becomes ludicrously apparent that what is needed is one of these McLarens, one of these Warhols to come & put something together out of it. As they begin to assemble this thing, it gains a bit of cultural gravity & people begin to find this new thing & even conform to it & soon you've got an enormous snowball rolling down the mountain collecting everything in its wake.

People have called McLaren & Warhol exploitative as if it's a bad thing, seems to be that it's better to be exploited than to be ignored. Once you get a bit of that gold value, you can run with it & do with it as you like. It's fantastic.

McLaren's art is fully realized in the movie "The Great Rock & Roll Swindle", make sure to watch it soon!

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