Collecting Schlock

The other day I was wondering, why is it so cool and fabulous to decorate our homes with Chinese Cultural Revolution tchotchkes and as I write this I am looking at my red felt Mao piggy bank (of course, what could be a more succinct visual metaphor for current day China?), but it isn't cool to collect objects from other bloody dictatorships? And BTW the Chinese tchotchkes are faux, so popular is the stuff that it's knocked off. Let's just say that it killed my aesthetic buzz when I started thinking of the millions of people who died thanks to Mao, to say the least. I read an article about a man who was unable to auction a portrait of Stalin, that was beyond the pale. apparently. Until he got Damien Hirst to paint a red clown nose on the portrait. (which sold for 140,000 pounds - see http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2010187,00.html)

People who write about less-popular dictators, for example, Franco, must content themselves to seek his mass cultural products and propaganda items like horny perverts seeking old pornographic postcards. Yet Mao killed millions and Franco hundreds of thousands.

US Pavilion Venice Biennial 2007

Granted, curating anything in the US pavilion is a thankless task. How do you make anything look good in a space that resembles a highway rest stop in Virginia? And anyone who has driving up 75 from the south going through VA knows what I mean, the rest stops are designed in a quaint neo-US-Colonial (not to be confused with the contemporary neo-US-Colonial in places like Puerto Rico, by which I mean Spanish Colonial architecture lovingly restored to Disney-like splendor, so that it may house a local branch of HOOTERS for the US tourists visiting Old San Juan on cruiseships) architectural style, to prepare visitors for Mount Vernon? But the lightbulb piece here made the pavilion look like a small town faux Colonial McMansion decked out at X-Mas time.

To the first-timer the Giardini is a lot like EPCOT

To the first-timer, the Biennial Giradini are a lot like EPCOT Center. Do you want to go Venezuela and eat typical chocolates? Great: this year's exhibition was a ranchito version of relational aesthetics meets 1970s trade fair, with Bolivarian Revolutionary cadres helpfully stirring in native dark chocolate powder into an acrid bitter paste? Just like EPCOT, you get to eat the typical foods!! (I always loved the mousse at "France" with its diminute Eiffel Tower) Or, do you want to wait in a line for 1 hour to see the German Pavilion, or wait 45 minutes in the Panini and Illy Latte line instead? (Mom! I am tired of "Mexico" I want to eat hot dogs at LIbby's Tomorrowland instead!)

Photo: Hapless and hungry artworld elites cue for paninnis and lukewarm lattes. This was akin to food ration cues in Eastern Bloc countries, what are they serving? I don't care, I am getting in line.