Updated to Wordpress 2.3.1, if you see anything all fucked up let me know. With each release, the upgrade process is less unpleasant, also it now tells me when my plugins are out of date, which gives me a “mad boner”.

This brings me to my next topic. Banning someone from taking pictures of Andy Warhol’s artwork is so perfect. It’s these detail strokes on the codification of our culture that make it so delightful. You see, when Andy Warhol took pictures of stuff, he knew what he was doing, because he was an artist. You guys, though. You guys are the audience. There’s no artists out there, just audience members.

Cue laugh track. Fade to commercial.

I’m really very excited. Soon we’ll have museums that require a NDA to get into, because describing the stuff inside will be considered intellectual property theft (my Apple rule applies here guys, if any galleries out there want to use this idea, just paypal me money).

This all stems, I think, from the same place as patriotism and stock market speculation. There is a belief that someone, somewhere, older or wiser or just closer to the subject, knows SO MUCH better than we do, in fact, we are allowed to turn off our brains and use their opinion as a fact. In this case, the idea is Andy Warhol just knew when copyrights were being infringed with his artwork, and he stopped shy of that. We, on the other hand, couldn’t be trusted to have his magnificent knowledge, and in order to stop us from hurting ourselves, the gallery here has simply, benevolently, totally removed the temptation to sin.

This all adds up to a clean removal of the person from the culture. Culture becomes a thing that you experience, a thing that you might even play-act a role in, but not something you actually create.