More art!

+Everyday I get updates on the art world from eflux, the US based art network service. Here galleries proudly advertise their upcoming highlights. These missives often contain descriptions which defy all understanding. Sometimes I wonder how linguistically stunted I am when I read the art bollocks that forms some announcements. Here’s something from Zurich, the birthplace of Dadaism and the longterm home of James Joyce. What to make of it? Perhaps I am only seeing it from the point of view of a heteronormative patriarch:
 
Kino Roland is closing down. As a sex cinema running for more than 40 years, it has been providing pornographic material until recently, and hereby complementing the array of sexual services at Zürich’s Langstrasse. It has been a mediating institution within the city, one that modulates and regulates the contemporary sexual subject through its semiotic-technical government. Its bricks, neon signs and mural paintings have been in charge of reproducing the biopolitical norm of the heteronormative patriarchy, inducing sexual excitement in the male viewers while unveiling the disobedient nature of sexual desires.

Eh?
 
+I watched a three part BBC series on the Young British Artists (YBAs). Each episode was much the same, which is to say nothing happened outside London, wherein dwelt some hip art students (Goldsmiths mainly) who found a cheap way of living (squatting) and drinking and shitting around until along came Saatchi who made their reputations when he bought some of their stuff. Then they all got pissed again. What a party! One or two went further, and now in their middle age they reflect on the scene from their Tuscan (or wherever) retreats. I have to say I too was a Young British Artist, it was just my unfortunate circumstance to be a postman in Malton (North Yorkshire) at the time. Talk about missed opportunities! I don’t resent my fate. I’m still a contemporary — as indeed we all are whilst we still live and breathe.