What Happens When You Don’t Like A Show Everyone Loves?

Susan Cianciolo at Bridget Donahue

Yesterday I had to do some work for a project and before setting off to that I wanted to see some art. Looking at art is something I really enjoy, it’s a reboot and many times a relaxing activity that I usually do by myself and on occasion with someone else.

I was in the Lower East Side/Chinatown area so I went to some shows I have been meaning to see but somehow kept missing. Some were okay, nothing really stood out—it’s hit or miss when you gallery-hop—and I wasn’t expecting much but something funny happened.

At one of the shows, the Susan Cianciolo show at Bridget Donahue, I had a very strange feeling.

I walked in and I looked around and I really wanted to like it, but I didn’t. And for some reason this made me feel bad. Or some sort of emotion of, ‘not getting it’ or a feeling of self-evaluation of aesthetic taste. I’m not here to dog on the show. It’s not about that. It’s totally par for the course that somethings resonate while other things don’t, but what I am curious about is what happens when there is a show that everyone else in the art world seems to love but you don’t.

There is every merit to why Cianciolo is having the applause that she is of late. Her work has bended and blended the lines between fashion and art for years now and should certainly be recognized. Her exhibiting at Donahue, which I have said a loud to many people, is the future and model for new galleries to strive for, and they make perfect sense together.

These things are right and just in the world and I’m not diminishing any of that, but there is an undoubted presence of the ‘cool’, of the ‘it’ in both artist and gallery that makes it hard to vocalize anything but admiration.

I guess it is only fair to say why/what I didn’t like about the show:

The show’s conceptual conceit, at its core, is the concept of the body. Cianciolo created three tent like rooms in Donahue’s space and there are three others, working in parallel, at Modern Art in London. The tents are open structures and are ‘room’ like in that they are populated with a domesticity that harkens to Bedouin tent meets afterschool program, meets quilting circle, meets ayahuasca safe zone. They are open, just beam structures, and you can see what’s inside, even though you are invited to remove shoes and go inside. The tents seem to have been ‘activated.’ There is debris and traces of participation. They are colorful, friendly, and have warmth but for me, something just felt off.

The inclusivity of it all made me a bit wary. The structures made me feel unconvinced. A tent is a place of hiding, a nest of safety, the way these were on view felt like displays and sets for some type of utopian living and interaction that I would only be able to participate in if socially forced and with audience. That felt strange, off, unsettling and it felt counter to the show’s premise. I didn’t feel my body and a relational desire to interact but the opposite. I was all cerebral. Wondering, what’s the point, what am I missing, why do I feel so distant and unconvinced?

This might be the point of the show, to ask these questions, and that in itself is a success but back to my main point. While I was looking and when I left the space I felt a type of guilt. So many people have mentioned this show to me. They don’t talk about it in big idea ways but there is definitely this overriding sense that it is ‘cool’ and that it is a must see because it is.

This happens a lot in art, there is a current of something that makes someone or someplace feel like it is epicenter, hitting a mark, is unquestionably good regardless of what is on view. The art world really loves this. It wants to feel like it is on pulse, on the cutting edge and this is at many times exciting to see and be a part of. What has me a bit flummoxed is that because of this, there is a blanket pass for work and shows and that seems reductive/bad for art.

If I say I don’t like a popular show it becomes not so much about the show but about my confirming a sort of status. It makes one feel like they are off the mark and somehow not attuned to what is ‘in’ and what is again the word, ‘cool.’

I’m not cool. Never been, never will be but I don’t say that or use that as a contrarian badge. I like to think and react to art for myself and I want to feel free to not feel this strange form of guilt because I happen to dislike one of the most endeared shows in one of the most endeared spaces in the city. I want to feel like we are all able to critique and be honest about what we are seeing and have a conversation about it versus feeling like taking photos, going to the opening, having degrees of association with it in terms of its in-crowd spectral is enough.

Not liking something is just as hard to understand and articulate as liking something. I know the word ‘like’ is the least expectable term when talking about art but let’s be honest. That’s what it comes down to and it’s the job of the viewer to understand why or why not and it is through conversations that one can be convinced otherwise or not.

Let’s evaluate how we view and feel about art, without the auras and obligations, and talk about how it can serve this big conversation of ideas and aesthetics without guilt, remorse or social status preservation.

A Dose of a Hallucinogen From a ‘Magic Mushroom,’ and Then Lasting Peace

 

I didn’t blog yesterday because I was sad. It happens. I was talking to a friend about this article. I don’t do mushrooms because they make me sick but ya, it is an interesting thing to think about.

A Dose of a Hallucinogen From a ‘Magic Mushroom,’ and Then Lasting Peace

By Jan Hoffman 

December. 1, 2016 - The New York Times

On a summer morning in 2013, Octavian Mihai entered a softly lit room furnished with a small statue of Buddha, a box of tissues and a single red rose. From an earthenware chalice, he swallowed a capsule of psilocybin, an ingredient found in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Then he put on an eye mask and headphones and lay down on a couch. Soon, images flew by like shooting stars: a spinning world that looked like a blue-green chessboard; himself on a stretcher in front of a hospital; his parents, gazing at him with aching sadness as he reached out to them, suffused with childlike love.

Psilocybin has been illegal in the United States for more than 40 years. But Mr. Mihai, who had just finished treatment for Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was participating in a study looking at whether the drug can reduce anxiety and depression in cancer patients. Throughout that eight-hour session, a psychiatrist and a social worker from NYU Langone Medical Center stayed by his side.

Published Thursday, the results from that study, and a similar small, controlled trial, were striking. About 80 percent of cancer patients showed clinically significant reductions in both psychological disorders, a response sustained some seven months after the single dose. Side effects were minimal.

In both trials, the intensity of the mystical experience described by patients correlated with the degree to which their depression and anxiety decreased.

The studies, by researchers at New York University, with 29 patients, and at Johns Hopkins University, with 51, were released concurrently in The Journal of Psychopharmacology. They proceeded after arduous review by regulators and are the largest and most meticulous among a handful of trials to explore the possible therapeutic benefit of psilocybin.

Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association, and Dr. Daniel Shalev of the New York State Psychiatric Institute are among leaders in psychiatry, addiction medicine and palliative care who endorsed the work. The studies, they wrote, are “a model for revisiting criminalized compounds of interest in a safe, ethical way.”

If research restrictions could be eased, they continued, “there is much potential for new scientific insights and clinical applications.”

Although cancer patients will not have access to therapeutically administered psilocybin anytime soon, the findings add vigor to applications to expand research in a multicenter trial with hundreds of participants.

Some medical professionals held the studies at arm’s length. Dr. William Breitbart, chairman of the psychiatry department at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, questioned this use of cancer patients. “Medical marijuana got its foot in the door by making the appeal that ‘cancer patients are suffering, they’re near death, so for compassionate purposes, let’s make it available,’ ” he said. “And then you’re able to extend this drug to other purposes.”

Psilocybin trials are underway in the United States and Europe for alcoholism, tobacco addiction and treatment-resistant depression. Other hallucinogens are also being studied for clinical application. This week, the Food and Drug Administration approved a large-scale trial investigating MDMA, the illegal party drug better known as Ecstasy, for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Cancer-related psychological distress, which afflicts up to 40 percent of patients, can be resistant to conventional therapy. Mr. Mihai’s anxiety began when doctors finally told him he was in remission.

He would keep touching the nodules on his neck, where the cancer had announced itself. He flew to Europe to celebrate the end of treatment and his graduation from college, but abruptly returned to New York, terrified to be away from oncologists. He began drinking daily, hard, jeopardizing his fragile health.

Alarmed, doctors suggested the psilocybin study.

He took the capsule and began tripping. After seeing himself on a hospital stretcher, he recalled: “I had an epiphany.”

“Why are you letting yourself be terrorized by cancer coming back? This is dumb. It’s in your power to get rid of the fear,” he told himself. “That’s when I saw black smoke rising from my body. And it felt great.

Three years later, Mr. Mihai, now 25 and a physician assistant in Las Vegas, said, “I’m not anxious about cancer anymore. I’m not anxious about dying.” The session, he added, “has made my life richer.”

The World Is Falling Apart

Every morning when I wake up I reach over and check my phone to make sure the world hasn't ended/we not at war (a new one), that there isn't another massive devastation natural or otherwise. I know that basically everyone does the very same thing each morning. The time that we are living in feels overridden with calamities and like everyone else I’m exhausted.

This is not about how one feels nor the endurance towards events and its affects on personal scales. That would be entirely too self absorbed, but let’s all sit back and take a second to feel this overwhelming exhaustion for a few minutes.

Living in the US and having Trump in power is like a never ending shouting match where you are talking to the most irrational and illogical person who thrives off audience attention. Most of the time it becomes a form of white noise, you think you have buffeted it out of your psyche but it’s like some high pitched noise that gives you migraines and sporadic nose bleeds.

Then there is all this earth Armageddon. Earthquakes, hurricanes, more hurricanes, more hurricanes. The unrelentingness of it is heartbreaking and the mediation of it repulsing in the story line arc of who gets attention. Easy hint everyone, if it effects people of color then it doesn’t matter and it’s God’s will. If it effects people who are white, than it is tragedy that was never deserved.

Then there is politics around the globe. Catalonia, oh my goodness. Spain what the hell are you doing?! Venezuela, Turkey, all the atrocities in Africa we like to ignore. Remember Syria? How about Myanmar? A Nobel Prize winner ignoring ethnic cleansing, what a plot twist. And North Korea. Sure that bat-shit insane leader had a few good zingers towards Trump but he is literally starving his country. Where did I miss? Oh yeah, just about everywhere around the world is having some form of reckoning/despair.

Where is the leadership? Where are the god damn adults in the room that are facing, recognizing, helping and changing these things? The UN? Sure I think they should exist but they are so self obsessed with proving relevancy that it’s a bit of a lark.

This world is small. We think because of the internet and globalization that it has somehow gotten smaller but it has always been this small and it is inhabited by this species call homo sapiens and we are and have always been linked. Are we a species that wants to self annihilate ourselves and the environment we live in or do we have the capacity to make it so that it can thrive?

We are doing a pretty good job at the self-annihilation or the past forever but it doesn’t feel right does it? It feels terrible to me and I’m sure for most of you it feels the same way. I’m a certified expert on being a homo sapien all my life and so are you and if I hate what’s happening so much, as you probably do, why does it keep going down this path?

It’s all so much these days. Sometimes when I wake up I think, ‘Oh good, the end of times is here, great, finally’ but I don’t want that to happen. But I am exhausted. I’m tired of all this terror and terribleness. It becomes gnawing, relentless and it’s no wonder we are all catatonic and dazed.

Enough of the boo-hooing though. There is work to be done. Many of us are just observers to the traumas to the world and even though we too feel those affects, even in this position, we have an obligation to help those that are actually within in.

Even if you feel tapped out of empathy or caring, still care. Still try and do what you can.