"She is doing nothing"

The cocktail of the season, a dancing cake

In the mail, I received copies of Volume 0, Overwrite, and Buffalo Zine, each of which features something by me. Also, a galley of my friend Patrick deWitt’s latest, Dodge City, which I read in a couple days, like I do with every one of his books.

At a preview of the Met’s new Alberto Giacometti exhibit in its Temple of Dendur, we wondered why the pedestals were so large and so white, interrupting the assimilation attempts being made, in these ancient surroundings, by bronze and plaster figures: 16 women and a small, perching cat. Was it the Parisian Foundation or the resident Egyptologist that felt so precious about the artifacts in their charge?

I do like the idea of seeing artworks set up within a gallery that is usually reserved for the artist’s own objects of fascination, creating, as they say, a “dialogue.” Scribbly Giacomettis stand around like museum-goers themselves, at a temple completed in 10 BCE, carved with those lanky deities they tend to resemble.

One even replaces a similarly “walking,” headless statue of “God’s Wife,” who I suppose is hidden in the archives now. The 1932 bronze’s body language is slightly more enthusiastic, her position a few paces forward, closer to the entrance—where tourists prefer to stand, too, for pictures. Standing near them, our own scribbly selves become part of an infinite ripple effect.

Over mini lobster rolls and cucumber French 75s, I chatted with the writer Lola Kramer, her brother, and the artist Ajay Kurian, founder of NewCrits, which just launched a podcast called Spent, concerned with art world burnout.

Artists are, as they say, “pivoting:” writing essays and plays, building amusement parks and robots with the help of engineers, overvaluing their own takes on other expertises. Is it possible, we asked one another, for an art world darling to become a stand-up comedian—killing on a regular club night, for example? Obviously, yes, but has anyone succeeded? It’s a question of establishing an audience and then essentially abandoning it, something artists used to be better at, I’d argue.

The conversation started with talk of the more familiar artist-to-filmmaker pipeline (Lola had been to a screening of Julian Schnabel’s latest feature, In the Hand of Dante, which stars, incredibly, Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, Gerard Butler, Al Pacino, John Malkovich, and Martin Scorsese). We brought up Kathryn Bigelow, Amalia Ulman, Steve McQueen, Miranda July—and then those actors who now paint, almost always a tragic case, with some exceptions (Lucy Liu? Leelee Sobieksi? I’m not qualified to make that call).

Unrelated: I’ve been more interested in what Hailey Bieber has to say ever since someone who worked on Rhode’s initial branding told me that she herself came up with their dauntless tagline (or “philosophy”): “one of everything really good.”